


and today was a day just like any other

by war_mice



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: I can't get over how everything would be so much different if Julia was there, Multi, THIS IS GONNA BE WILD, so here you go, there were 39 other timelines and I am nOT OKAY
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2018-09-18 06:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9371780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/war_mice/pseuds/war_mice
Summary: The Admin building is creepier at night, with all of the dark wood paneling and weird radiator sounds that old buildings always have. Julia arrives ten minutes early but she’s starting to see that her A-type tendencies don’t hold a candle to Alice’s, who’s already waiting with books in languages Julia has never seen before. She’d expected candles and... sage smudging, maybe, but there’s only Alice sitting cross-legged next to a desk lamp on the floor, looking impatient.-OR-A study of Julia's character and her potential relationships, both platonic and romantic.





	1. i need another reason why, i need another reason, tell me to breathe

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hey. I'm writing fanfiction for the first time in ages because this show took hold of my brain with both hands. Sorry for any grammatical errors, especially lack of punctuation; more than a few keys on my laptop keyboard don't work, the period key included (I should probably find a beta reader soon).
> 
> Anyways, I don't own anything, etc etc, and the title is taken from a Jack's Mannequin song called "I'm Ready"
> 
> Enjoy! And if you want to freak out about Julia Wicker & Co with me come by my tumblr (breakshitandtakepictures.tumblr.com) and say hi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own the show, the chapter title is from "I've got Friends" by Manchester Orchestra.
> 
> Also I can't get enough of messing with timelines, so if you all have any prompts send them my way at breakshitandtakepictures.tumblr.com

**Loop 1 – The beginning**

 

There are times when Julia thinks Yale is a thousand miles away and the monotony of waiting to get there might swallow her whole. James looks at her oddly at these end-of-semester parties, when she’s pacing and can’t sit still unless she’s perched on the edge of the couch, on his lap, like a bird taking rest from flight. She doesn’t think he’ll ever quite understand the feeling she lives with of being meant for something bigger, something stranger. He looks at her and sees the stories she has created of herself and thinks she’s ambitious. Julia doesn’t know how to explain that it isn’t ambition when you don’t feel like there’s another choice.

 

She thinks Quentin might understand.

 

(She thinks Q might understand maybe a little too well.)

 

There is a buzzing just below her skin as she tells Quentin that life is “starting, for real” because it feels like she’s trying to convince herself more than anything else.

 

When Julia enters the elevator she hits the button for the 3rd floor and feels her heartbeat stutter but can’t pinpoint the reason why until the floor begins to descend. Everything that comes after leaves her breathless in a way that she hasn’t felt since lying under a table staring up at a child’s map drawn in crayon.

 

She is taken to a room fit for a dissertation defense and when the man who insists he is Dean raises his voice she whirls to tell him he doesn’t know a single thing about her but fire spills from her hands instead.

_This is the beginning. This is the moment that Julia would want to hold on to if Jane’s magic would let her hold onto anything at all._

_(It does not.)_

 

Julia is placed in a dorm room by herself, so no one is there the night she gets in a fight with James over the phone and tries a teleportation spell to maybe go visit him, to try to explain. It’s cobbled together from stolen passages in library books and the incantations are more difficult than anything she’s tried so far. The fire that surges through her is nothing like the sparks that shot from her hands three weeks before; it burns, and she burns with it.

 

**Loop 2 – In which Jane places Julia with a roommate**

 

The key doesn’t turn in the lock as easily as she’d hoped but Julia thinks to herself _I bet there’s a spell for that_ and pushes the door inward, trying to swallow a grin. The room seems somehow bigger on the inside than she expected but what catches her eye is the angry-looking woman lying on the bed on the unpacked side of the suite. Her legs are crossed and her feet are kicked up onto the footboard, boots still on. Julia is staring at the expanse of skin stretching from her roommate’s ankle to the top of her thigh and a quiet scoff finally snaps her focus back to the woman’s face. Amused eyes, the greenest she’s ever seen, stare back at her, but her tone is annoyed when she finally speaks:

 

“I’m not paying boarding fees if they put me with some girl that never got her co-ed experimenting over with,” she declares.

 

Julia scoffs because she isn’t sure how to reply (doesn’t want to protest too much.)

 

“I’m Julia,” she says. “The Dean didn’t tell me when I was signing those waivers that I was going to have to dorm like a teenager, so it looks like we’ll both be disappointed.”

 

That gets her a laugh, at least.

 

“Kady,” her roommate replies, sitting up for the first time. She’s smiling (or smirking, it’s hard to tell) and Julia thinks that this might not be so bad after all.

_Quentin’s father is diagnosed with brain cancer before they finish out their first semester. Julia is with him as he tries to cure Cancer Puppy but something goes wrong, Q’s hands are shaking as he moves them into rapidly blurring positions. He’s choking and Julia is trying to pull some of the twisted magic back into herself to save him and the room is fading before either of them can even be afraid of the outcome._

**Loop 3 – In which Julia is introduced to Alice**

 

Julia is halfway through getting dressed and she’s rushing. Staying up late talking about ink magic was great but in addition to not needing light to see, Kady also apparently doesn’t need sleep and had no problem getting out the door for class while Julia was still dead to the world. It doesn’t help that she just woke up from a dream she can’t remember and has the sinking feeling that there’s an important detail just out of reach. She’s stumbling into a pair of jeans when her hand grazes the symbol on her thigh and she has to stifle a yelp of surprise and pain.

 

It’s bright red like she’s been burned, but that’s impossible (that’s something that people remember, isn’t it?)

 

“Shit,” she says, and sits down on the bed. This was going to take some delicate handling.

 

\---

 

The books slam onto the table only a few inches from Alice’s hand. She starts and then freezes, determined not to flinch at the sound.

 

“You’re smart,” Julia says. It comes out like an accusation.

 

“I study,” Alice corrects. She goes back to editing her notes. Julia is still standing there, now looking a little anxious and more than a little embarrassed.  Ten more seconds pass before she pulls a chair back with a conspicuous scrape and sits down heavily.

 

“I need your help,” she finally admits. Alice grits her teeth and looks up from behind her glasses, which are perched low on her nose.

 

“Why would I help you? I don’t even know you; this is the first time we’ve ever talked.”

 

The distrust is evident in Alice’s voice and Julia doesn’t have the patience to try to convince her.

“Just...follow me,” she says in lieu of explaining, and grabs Alice’s wrist to pull her along. It takes less than ten steps before Alice has twisted out of her grasp, but she follows Julia anyway.

 

They wind up in the nearest girl’s bathroom and Julia turns to lock the door once they’re both inside.

 

In retrospect it’s probably not the best course of action to drag your most talented classmate into a locked room and begin shimmying out of your jeans without any explanation. Alice is stuttering and blushing and Julia can make out a mumbled “I don’t really—I’m not—“ before Julia rolls her eyes and cuts her off.

 

“Just look,” she says, and Alice finally notices the symbol on her leg. “I have a seriously unfunny tattoo that I don’t remember getting, except I’m missing the matching hangover that would explain it, so... Please. Explain it?”

 

Alice is still staring.

 

“How did you get this?” she asks, and suddenly all of that intelligence and focus is pointed directly at Julia and she doesn’t know how to respond.

 

Alice gets sick of waiting.

 

“Okay, fine. Tonight, 10 pm, meet me at the Admin Building. And bring an Estonian-English dictionary,” she rattles off.

 

“An Estonian...what the fuck? Alice! That’s not an answer!” Julia is calling after her but she’s already unlocked the door and practically _fled_.

 

\---

 

The Admin building is creepier at night, with all of the dark wood paneling and weird radiator sounds that old buildings always have. Julia arrives ten minutes early but she’s starting to see that her A-type tendencies don’t hold a candle to Alice’s, who’s already waiting with books in languages Julia has never seen before. She’d expected candles and... sage smudging, maybe, but there’s only Alice sitting cross-legged next to a desk lamp on the floor, looking impatient.

 

“Well? You already stripped once,” she says, and Julia wore sweatpants specifically so she wouldn’t have trouble getting access to her newest modification, so.

 

When she pulls the fabric down, however, there isn’t a mark on her.

 

“What the hell,” Julia complains, and she almost starts searching the rest of her skin for the sigil before she stops herself. Alice looks exasperated.

 

“We’re contacting the other side. Did you think this magic would play nice? Nut up,” is the only explanation Julia gets.

 

“I didn’t sign on for this séance bullshit,” Julia says, and hopes her apprehension isn’t too obvious. It’s just that the sigil is gone and that’s fine by her, there’s no need to go dragging dead people into the mix.

 

“That symbol you had? It’s used to summon spirits from the other side. I think—” Alice stops, forces herself to start again: “My brother, he was a student here. He died. It was a few years ago, and I, I saw the mark on your leg and it’s the same one in the books I’ve been reading and I think, you know, I think he’s trying to tell me something,” she says all at once, and it’s the most Julia has ever hear her speak.

_This means something_ she thinks, and she can’t remember the last time she did anything that felt important.

 

“Okay,” Julia says quietly, “I’ll help. And I’m sorry. About your brother.”

 

Alice swallows and nods and goes back to reading but it’s less than a minute before she’s swearing under her breath.

 

“What is it? It’s not past midnight already, right?”

 

“No,” Alice answers, “But we’re missing something important. We need—”

 

As if on queue, Julia can hear footsteps a second before the door bangs open and Kady stalks through, followed by the guy she vaguely recognizes as Kady’s boyfriend (Perry? Penny?)

 

“Hey loser,” Kady drawls, looking completely unconcerned with the fact that she just stumbled across two freshman doing spell-work in a closed academic building.

 

Julia squints up at her roommate. “You guys need to find another room to hook up in. We’re busy.”

 

“We were hoping you’d let us join,” Kady says in a voice laced with innuendo, at the same time that Alice insists “We need them!” and Julia is torn between making the obvious orgy joke and asking what the hell is going on.

 

She’s saved by Kady’s shadow, who decides then is a good time to explain their arrival.

 

 “Look, I gather you guys need some extra hands or something?” he asks grudgingly, and Alice practically lights up.

 

“Four! We need four magical adepts. Eight hands—sit! Please? This is perfect timing!”

Alice is a second away from literally tripping over herself and Julia is still staring at—

 

“It’s Penny. No, I don’t give a shit that you don’t know my name. Yes, I can— _no_ , I can’t teach you. Either you can or you can’t,” Penny, if possible, is even more irritable than Alice.

 

“So. What now?” asks Kady, who sits down cross-legged next to Julia and looks at Alice expectantly. Alice still looks like she can’t believe her luck but the question brings everyone back to the task at hand.

 

“Let’s do this. I don’t have all night,” Penny says, and that’s as good a starting bell as any.

 

\---

 

It’s so quiet that Julia can hear the second hand ticking away on the clock behind her, is becoming self-conscious of the loudness of her own breathing. Then it’s exactly midnight and the bubbling of the brownish red sludge stops. They’re all looking in the mirror but its surface is still— there is no one unexpected staring back.

 

Kady is the first to break the silence:

 

“Well, I’m hungry,” she announces. Julia laughs before she can stop herself and Alice is looking so, so lost. Penny just seems impatient to leave, and he’s the first to stand up.

 

“Let me know if shit gets exciting,” he says, and looks to Kady before heading out of the room.

Kady is also moving to get up when Julia makes a snap decision.

 

“We have freezer pizza back in our room,” she hedges. “And scotch. If you’re hungry too, Alice?”

 

That brings the other girl’s attention back to earth.

 

“I’m not a huge fan of liquor,” Alice says tentatively, “but I could eat.”

 

\---

 

The night goes much later than even Julia anticipated when she invited Alice over. It’s the still hours of the early morning and Alice has had more to drink than she can rightfully remember. She’s on the floor, leaning heavily backwards against Kady’s bed, complaining about a girl named Margo.

 

“She says she wants to be friends but she’d always there, just _looking_ at me. It doesn’t feel like friendship, you know? It feels like she’s sizing me up... I don’t like it.”

 

Julia thinks Alice is half-right; it sounds like Margo might be checking her out, but she isn’t about to open that can of worms.

 

“What a bitch,” Kady says. Julia snorts into her drink. “You’re not a piece of meat,” Kady adds, but only Julia hears her.

 

Alice is smiling distractedly, drunkenly sure of one thing: _this_ is friendship, maybe, this thing that was unfolding right now.

_Everyone skips their first class the next morning. The sunlight is too bright and Julia is still half-drunk and also the first one awake. She manages to yank the curtain shut and only makes it to Kady’s bed before her headache forces her to lie down again. Kady grunts in her sleep and pulls the blanket over them both. Alice barely stirs from where she’d passed out on the floor._

_They’re all still asleep as the screaming starts in Professor March’s classroom._

**Loop 4 – In which Julia tries to cheat off of Penny**

 

Julia is a champion test-taker. She can make pretty much any standardized exam her bitch; it’s not bragging when it’s just the honest truth.

 

That’s why the Brakebills entrance exam is absolute bullshit.

 

The test begins with math but the numbers won’t stay in their original equations. She does her best to solve them when she first turns each page because if she waits too long they’re all completely different.

 

After fifteen minutes of eye-strain she finally hazards a look towards her neighbor’s paper. She finds it to be blank, and soon she can feel his glare burning into her forehead. She looks up, mouthing “sorry!” to the guy. If looks could kill...

 

The rest of the written test passes with baffling speed, and if anything the practical portion of the entrance exam is even weirder. When it’s all over Julia is exhausted. She barely makes it through the door of her assigned room before she face-plants onto the bare mattress of the unclaimed bed. There’s a not-so-kindhearted laugh from the opposite end of the room and Julia rolls onto her side to see where it’s coming from.

 

“Hey, _roomie_ ,” the woman says sarcastically. “I’m Kady.”

 

\---

 

Class starts the next morning, which is a Tuesday. Julia is early but not as early as a quiet blond girl who sits in the front of the room and looks at her hands where they rest on her desk. She drops her books (which arrived mysteriously outside of her door overnight) onto an empty desk in a middle row, and is flicking through one of them with tired interest when someone speaks up behind her.

 

“Julia?” She turns. It’s Quentin, in all his disarming glory. She isn’t actually sure what to say to him after the argument they had before everything that happened yesterday. It figures that out of anything that could have followed her from Brooklyn, it would be Q.

 

“Hey, Quentin,” she says, because there isn’t anything else to start with. “I didn’t see you in the exam.”

 

“I was late,” he says absently, and then, “you don’t seem that excited to see me.” He looks at his shoes, then back up to search her face. Julia doesn’t know how to explain to him that she’s sorry for disbelieving in all of his magic obsessions just a day before they’re both admitted to a school for magic, but that her point still stands. She doesn’t have to when a voice speaks up from beside her.

 

“Listen man, you don’t want to get into...that whole mess,” it says, and Julia turns to see the angry guy from the exam. He’s still refusing to wear a shirt with sleeves, and his arms are crossed on top of the desk he’s deposited himself in. Quentin opens his mouth but no words come out. His jaw snaps shut and he nods, and then Q is walking to sit at the back of the room and Julia is torn between guilt and relief.

 

“You could just thank me,” sleeveless-t-shirt-guy says, “And my name is Penny. Stop hating on the clothes.”

 

Julia has a split second to skeptically consider the name he gives before he’s rolling his eyes.

 

“Yeah, it’s a nickname—no, I won’t tell you my full name— _yes_ , I can read your mind. And it was pretty torn up a minute ago,” Penny says. “You’ve gotta get a lock on that. If I have to hear you thinking about nerd-wonder over there and all of your weird history I won’t be able to pay attention.”

 

It almost sounds like he’s giving Julia advice rather than telling her off for being dramatic. She looks at him critically for a second; he was kind of a dick, but at least he was honest.

 

“Point taken,” Julia says.

 

The professor walks in and their conversation stops there.

 

\---

 

It’s another week until Penny pops into her life again. In that time she’s managed to have an actual conversation with Q that didn’t end in either one of them walking away so she’s in a much better place emotionally than the last time they spoke.

 

Julia and Kady are in the library looking for a translation, against the advice of literally every upperclassmen at Brakebills. (Something about too many finding spells being cast in the same place making any search pretty much pointless. Julia remains undaunted, and Kady takes it as a challenge.)

 

They’re just beginning to get frustrated when they hear a yelp from behind one of the stacks nearby. When Julia gets up to investigate she’s mostly just hoping to break up the monotony, and her prayers are answered in the form of Penny being mobbed by two fluttering hardcovers.

He’s swatting at them but also trying to not tear any pages so his success is pretty limited. Julia drags a stepstool over and hops up, grabbing the two bloodthirsty tome by their spines and slamming them together, closing them and stopping the attack pretty effectively. Penny looks like he’s trying to say thank you without actually admitting he needed help and Julia takes pity on him.

 

“Can you translate medieval Cornish?” she prompts.

 

“Isn’t that just like, old-timey English?” he asks, tugging at the hem of his vest and trying to get himself in order.

 

“Ugh,” says Julia, and she jerks her head for him to follow. Surprisingly, Penny actually does.

 

\---

 

It’s been another month and Julia can honestly say her work-life balance is an actual functioning ratio. Magic is hard and doesn’t come without literal blood, sweat, and tears; it’s far more formulaic than she ever expected, and at least half of her class time is devoted to moving her fingers into increasingly unlikely formations. But most surprising out of everything is that she has an honest-to-god group of _friends_. That’s not to say that undergrad-era Julia was ever friendless, but other than Q and James (who she barely remembers enough now to miss) everyone else always seemed so muted, so irrelevant.

_Maybe some of the magic of Brakebills is in the people it attracts_ , she thinks, but not as loudly as she used to. She’s seen Penny self-medicate enough to know even the most simple thoughts can give a psychic a headache if enough of them are rattling around at once. She looks over to where he’s practicing Popper’s Number 26 hand positon but his pinkies keep crooking inward, as reasonable pinky fingers are wont to do. He doesn’t seem to have picked up on her introspection. They’re cloistered in a windowless study room in the girl’s dorm that is never locked, even after-hours. Kady is sketching something in one of her notebooks but her look of concentration lets Julia know it’s a casting diagram and not a doodle. Julia is just about to go back to her own tortuous attempts at Ugarte’s Prismatic Spray (a useless party trick but good practice, plus Julia secretly loves to watch the rainbow sparks trail from her fingers) when Penny shakes his head like he’s trying to get water out of his ears.

 

“You okay?” Kady asks, because he suddenly goes incredibly still.

 

“Yeah, I’m—okay, I have to leave for a minute,” he says, but he’s distracted by something they can’t hear. Julia can recognize at least that at this point.

 

“So you just need to go...somewhere? This very minute?” she asks, but Kady has already gotten to her feet.

 

“We’re obviously coming with you,” Kady announces, like she’s 100% aware of how hard it is to argue with her.

 

“Obviously,” Julia echoes, and Penny know better than to put up more than a half-hearted fight.

 

\---

 

Ten minutes into their walk across campus and Penny has finally snapped at Kady for singing “follow the psychic boy” to the tune of Yellow-Brick Road.

 

“I hate that word,” he says, so she replaces it with “mind-slut,” which isn’t really much better and doesn’t have the same ring to it so the singing stops pretty quickly after that.

 

They finally reach a nondescript door in the admin building and when Penny throws it open they find Q and Alice (the shy academic superstar among a sea of regular geniuses) sitting in front of a mirror on the floor.

 

“Kinky,” Kady jokes, before Penny can announce that they’re here to lend a hand, or six.

 

“This is perfect timing,” Alice says, “but I only need four magical adepts.”

 

“Wouldn’t five be better? I mean, it’s a more significant number in a lot of languages so...what about Estonian?” Quentin ventures. It all kind of sounds like bullshit but Julia is tired of the slow pacing of their first-year courses so she’s immediately on board. Kady and Penny seem equally eager to work some group casting for their own reasons so they all buckle down to adjusting the components for an additional magical adept.

 

\---

 

It’s midnight and nothing is happening. They give it a few more anxious minutes before Alice admits defeat. Quentin looks equally dejected, and Julia wishes she could ask what the casting was for without feeling like an intruder. Q offers to clean up which gives everyone an out, but the look on Alice’s face has her staying as well, silently putting dried herbs back into their containers and rubbing chalk marks off of the floor. When they’re about to leave Julia notices the fading traces of a frowning face rubbed into fog on the mirror. While Alice’s back is turned she waves to Q to get his attention then points to the mirror with her best condescending face, trying to convey “what the fuck is wrong with you?” without any words (because who else would have done something so depressing?)

 

Quentin looks surprised and then offended in turns, and apparently they’ve been quiet for too long because Alice finally turns to see what they’ve been doing. Julia is just glad the fog on the glass has evaporated because there’s nothing to see anymore, and Alice is biting her lip and hurrying out of the room. Julia and Quentin file out silently after her, closing the door behind them. It feels oddly final, and Julia tries not to think about it when she gets back to her room. She lets Kady distract her with a rumor about some protection amulet and eventually they break out the liquor to celebrate their first out-of-bounds spellcasting (even if it didn’t actually work).

 

\---

 

The next morning is hungover and Julia is having trouble staying awake as their professor drones on in broken German. It’s only when he stops that she finally pays attention to the classroom, just in time to realize that she can’t move. She can hear a fluttering and gentle, calculated footsteps but she can’t turn her head no matter how loudly she tells herself to move. Finally a figure comes in to view.

 

(Everything that comes after makes her wish he’d stayed in her peripheral vision. She cannot unsee his alien hands, the cloud of insects crawling over every inch of space above his neck, the gurgle and _snap_ of Professor March’s last moments.)

  
They survive because of Kady’s well-tuned fight-or-flight response, Alice’s advanced casting, and Penny’s dependable ability to throw heavy objects. The sequence of events unfolds as Julia takes cover with Quentin, feeling utterly useless. Everyone wants to believe they’d be a hero in a fight but Julia is astounded to realize how little she has to contribute. The only thing she knows about battle-magic is that it’s illegal at Brakebills.

 

In the weeks that follow the attack she becomes obsessed.

 

\---

 

It’s a lucky break that Kady is her roommate, really, because she’s the only person that Julia has seen successfully use offensive magic. That is where her luck ends.

 

“I meditate, every day, when I get back from classes. I don’t know what to tell you, Jules. This was the first kind of magic I learned and you have to run clean for it to work,” she explains. Julia suddenly has so many more questions. What kind of life did Kady come from, that her first spells were made to hurt, to defend herself? She isn’t sure if they’re close enough to ask so she doesn’t, she only asks if there’s a way to cheat.

 

“There’s always a way to cheat but...It’s dangerous,” Kady is the least timid person Julia has met at Brakbills but she seems suddenly nervous. Julia wasn’t expecting the tone of protectiveness and doesn’t know how to tell Kady why she needs to learn. (She tries anyway.)

 

“I never want to be that defenseless again,” Julia says quietly. It’s humiliating to admit but that’s all she has. Kady looks at her like maybe she understands.

 

“Okay,” she says, like she’s trying to convince herself still. “Okay.”

 

\---

 

Emotion bottle are simultaneously the best and worst things that magic has given her yet. For three blissful hours she can care about absolutely nothing outside of the pure pursuit of knowledge.

 

The hard part is when it all comes rushing back.

 

Kady still insists on accompanying Julia when she does the spell for the bottles. She won’t say why but Julia gets the feeling that Kady actually cares what happens to her. (She hopes she isn’t projecting, hopes that this unexpected tenderness is real and not in her head.)

 

After a week of midnight practices in the campus forest she finally screws up; when Julia checks the time she realizes she’s been bottled for almost 4 hours.

 

“Fuck,” she says in a monotone. Kady looks up from the stump she’d been sitting on, closes her book, checks the time.

 

“Fuck,” she agrees enthusiastically. “Alright, let’s rip this bandaid off. This time is gonna suck.”

 

When the bottle uncorks Julia is pretty sure she cries for the rest of the night. She has a vague memory of making it back to their room, Kady leading her by the hand because she can’t see through the tears. Then those same hands are guiding her into bed and she hears an “I’m sorry, I swear I’m not a creep,” as she’s helped out of her jeans and into soft cotton shorts. When Kady pulls the comforter up to Julia’s chin and turns to walk away she finds her hand shooting out to grab Kady’s wrist.

 

“Stay,” she says quietly. Julia’s throat is raw but she’s feeling more coherent at least, sober enough to know if she wakes up alone in the morning this emotional hangover will be a hundred times worse.

 

Kady rolls her eyes and gruffs out a “God, so needy,” before she’s getting into her own comfortable clothes (mostly consisting of a comically oversized t-shirt that’s from some band she doesn’t recognize) and burrows under the covers. They don’t touch for a full minute, until Julia wiggles closer and reaches out a hand to curl around Kady’s forearm. Her roommate opens one eye to appraise the situation and apparently has no complaints because the eye closes and she huffs quietly. Julia is exhausted but she doesn’t lose consciousness until after Kady’s breathing slows.

 

\---

 

The morning is overcast and Julia is disoriented for a minute when she wakes up. She realizes two things at once: she is in the wrong bed, and there is someone else in the bed with her. Another second passes before she remembers that it’s her own room at least, and that the warm presence behind her is Kady. Julia forgets to breathe until a sleep-heavy voice says “You didn’t make it to your own bed last night,” in lieu of saying good-morning. Julia cranes her head to see Kady, who is waiting to see how she’ll react after the emotion bottle debacle of the night before.

 

“Feelings are the worst,” Julia says, and then drops her head back onto the pillow. Kady laughs. Julia is glad she isn’t facing her because she has no idea what her face is doing right now. Kady is still waiting for the other shoe to drop; the watch on the nightstand says it’s only 6:42 in the morning.

 

Julia makes a decision that she is pretty sure will backfire, and nestles backwards into the warm space that Kady is currently occupying. After tense fifteen seconds she surprised to feel a strong but slender arm wind its way around her, a warm hand splaying itself across her ribcage.

 

“Breathe,” Kady murmurs behind her, “and go back to sleep.”

 

Julia didn’t know she’d been holding her breath to begin with but she releases the air trapped in her lungs and does her best to shut down the thoughts racing through her head. Amazingly, sleep comes.

 

When they wake up again at 9 there’s too much rushing for either of them to try to talk, and Julia heads to her first class with only 5 minutes to get there, yelling a “see you at dinner!” to Kady, who is still brushing her teeth and can’t properly answer.

_Pussy_ , her brain whispers, and Julia can’t help but agree.

 

She only needs to walk into her lecture with Penny before he is absolutely cracking up, tears in his eyes from laughing.

 

“What,” Julia snaps, knowing her guards were down.

 

“Ohh man,” he says, when he’s finally calmed down. “I’ve been there before. Wow. Good luck. She’s a tough one.”

 

Julia pretends she has no idea what he means, which only makes the whole situation even funnier to Penny. _At least have the decency to not tell her_ , she thinks loudly, and Penny is still smiling but he sighs and throws up his hands theatrically and then he’s nodding, with the smuggest look Julia has ever seen.

 

“Fuck you,” she says out loud, and he laughs.

 

“Not me,” he says, and before she can think of a retort the lecture begins.

 

\---

 

They don’t talk about whatever it was that happened, but it does change things. There’s a definite tension, especially when they’re alone in their dorm room and it’s just a little too quiet. Kady sometimes opens her mouth to say...something, but she always stops herself. Julia wants to scream at her, “Just say it! Just acknowledge whatever it is that’s different” but she’s never had the right words to talk about this sort of thing so she doesn’t say anything at all.

 

A week later Julia is out in the woods, without an emotion bottle this time. It’s the only way Kady will stay behind and Julia can barely cast without a crutch, especially with her _right there_. She is in the middle of trying the spell they dubbed “magic missile” and her fingertips buzz like she’s dipped them in champagne. This is going to be the time that works, she thinks, just as Quentin stalks out from behind a shrub. Julia loses her focus completely, the spell unraveling in the air. She is yelling at Quentin as the energy hangs over the packed ground, twisting in the empty space, looking for escape.

 

He’s angrier, shouting “Stop being this reckless because you’re pissed that there’s something that you can’t actually do! Listen, I’m sorry, but I mean it. You can really get hurt with this stuff, and for what? Grow up—the Beast is gone, Julia. And maybe he was our fault but the damage is done and it won’t help anything if you get hurt too.”

 

There’s absolute silence. Q has never yelled at her, not really, not even at his most depressive. Julia can’t even tell him he’s wrong because he probably isn’t. She’s about to attempt an apology when she notices that the energy hanging in the air has settled over her hands. The bubbly feeling is gone and it’s been replacing by a stinging, a slight burning that grows steadily.

 

“Q, help, Quentin, I think it went wrong, check the book, I think—”

 

Julia screams, can’t stop screaming. The fireball that should have spiraled into the tree stump 20 feet ahead has coalesced and adhered to her hands and no water spell Quentin tries will put it out. She’s dimly aware of Kady running into the clearing (had she been following Julia every time?)

But the fire is spreading up her arms and she passes out, luckily, before it consumes her.

 

 

**Loop 5 – In which Eliot is the welcome committee**

 

“Julia Wicker?” A well-dressed guy is giving her a once-over and for a moment she feels self-conscious until Julia realizes that his squint has more to do with the smell of vodka that hangs around him than actual judgement. She can recognize something as mundane as alcoholism (her dad gave her plenty of practice) and nothing about this meeting explains how her elevator to the basement somehow brought her to a room of glass and light and steel.

 

“ ...You’re early,” he drawls. The look of disdain would have been offensive if she wasn’t so ready to interrogate someone

 

“Who are you? Where _am_ I?” Julia’s voice takes on a shrewd tone that she can’t shake but she’s too disoriented to care.

 

“My, my. Did you know you ask a lot of questions?” His hungover squint has mutated into a thoughtful look that seems painful in the amount of focus it take him.

 

“Yeah. Sure do.”

 

“I’m Eliot,” he declares, as if announcing foreign royalty. He does a complicated-looking wave with the hand not holding a cigarette.

 

“That doesn’t answer my questions,” Julia practically _growls_ , and Eliot has the nerve to laugh. It’s clear and loud and unapologetic.

 

“Oh, you’re fiery. We likey.”

 

Julia wonders who else he means by “we,” but she doesn’t meet Margo until after the entrance exam. It’s dark outside and Eliot is leading her by the hand over stone steps, between hedges, behind a house to a patio where noise and people spill over stone walls haphazardly. Eliot only lets go of Julia in order to better sprawl on a lounge chair next to and partially on top of a woman wearing a shade of coral that seems perfectly coordinated with her lipstick. The stranger is measuring her up, Julia can tell.

 

“So this is her,” she finally says, as if picking up the thread of a conversation Julia can’t hope to follow. “She seems a bit Ivy-league, no?”

 

“You’re scaring the child!” Eliot laughs, and his friend finally breaks and giggles. She holds out a hand, palm down. Julia doesn’t know if she is supposed to kiss it or shake it. She settles for raising an eyebrow instead.

 

“I’m Margo,” she declares. “Join us; take a load off!”

 

Margo pats the space not occupied by Eliot and Julia can’t help but miss Quentin. Even as she plops herself down and tries to get comfortable she can’t help but wonder if he was still here, if he’d passed the exam, who his roommate was. Her distracted thoughts are interrupted by a yell from Margo.

 

“Todd!” she calls. A twitchy-looking guy looks up from a bar Julia hadn’t noticed. “Our newest friend would like a beverage. Please oblige?”

 

Todd looks like he was born to fetch cocktails but Julia only answers “Scotch, neat,” when he asks what he can make her.

 

Eliot sighs.

 

“I have so, so much to teach you,” he laments, but clinks her glass with his all the same.

_This is the loop in which a vengeful expelled student attacks the university; Marina Andrieski doesn’t particularly care for collateral damage and she leaves an old classmate in a coma to enact her plan_. _Eliot was just a freshman when Marina was expelled but he must have done something to offend; her attack on him is flawless_. _In his dream he is stuck on his family farm again, having gotten kicked in the head by an errant horse and woken from a spectacular concussive delusion_. _But when Fogg lifts the wards to let the Matarese do its work there is someone other than Marina waiting to come through_. _While she steals back her memories, the Beast begins his most bloody feast yet_.


	2. if you're gonna hit me, hit me harder than this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “From now until the match this weekend, your asses are ours,” Eliot drawls. “There will be no distractions!”
> 
> “Says the guy who accessorizes with a flask,” Kady quips, just a little too loudly. Eliot breaks his straight-man routine and chuckles, passing the aforementioned item her way.
> 
> “It never empties,” he admits conspiratorially. 
> 
> Kady shrugs, and takes a pull.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyyy again; sorry it's been over a week, I mostly write late at night after work or on my day off each week, except I haven't gotten a day off in like...too long, probably.
> 
> Anyway, here's chapter two! Unbeta'd because I have yet to be able to find one, and my keyboard still has a few broken keys so sorry in advance. This one is only two time loops, b/c the word count kind of got away from me.
> 
> (Also, yay season two! Tried to get this up in time for the premiere but I'm a disaster, so.)
> 
> I don't own anything, chapter title is from the song "Power" by Bastille.
> 
> Enjoy!

**Loop 6 – In which Julia is given a book**

 

 _Okay, there are some details that need to be ironed out_ , Julia thinks as she wakes up to her first full day at Brakebills. Some facts that she’d taken for granted with her undergraduate career seemed too mundane to apply here. For instance, tuition? And books? Did a school for magicians take regular money, or something more exotic (blood sacrifice, weird herbs, etc)?

 

Reality was coming as an inconvenience and she was still exhausted from the day before. The Dean had explained that fatigue was normal after someone’s first major casting but this was just... embarrassing.

 

“Are you going to stare at the ceiling all day or are you gonna get your ass up and help me find breakfast?”

 

 _Right,_ she thinks, _roommate_.

 

\---

 

Thirty minutes later Julia is mostly awake and attempting to tame her hair into something resembling gentle waves. Eventually she gives up; maybe when they ship all her stuff from home she’ll have a better chance. (Thinking of home makes her think of James, which is a Bad Idea and brings too many complicated feelings along with it. She forcibly locks it down.)

 

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” she says to Kady. “Do you have a campus map or something?”

 

Kady chuckles lowly.

 

“What good would a map do? Everything moves around anyway,” she says, as if that’s common knowledge. Julia is more than a little curious to how her new roommate knows the school so well already, but decides it isn’t the right time to ask. She’s grabbing her bag when she hears a resounding _thump_ directly outside their door. Kady huffs and yanks the door open to reveal two identically drab looking cardboard boxes with their names scrawled haphazardly over the tape holding them shut. Julia drags hers inside (it’s heavier than she expects) and takes a pen to the tape. In a second she’s staring at the cover of a much-abused hardcover that seems too thin to be entitled _The History of Magic_. She opens it up before actually thinking about it.

 

“Holy shit,” she says, “this thing is like, a thousand pages. This is some Doctor Who level stuff.”

 

Kady hasn’t even opened her box of textbooks but she is looking at it warily.

 

“I’ll check mine out when we get back. C’mon, I’m starving,” she says, and then she’s out the door. Not wanting to get left behind on a campus that apparently _moves_ , Julia follows.

 

\---

 

It isn’t until Julia is looking over her class schedule that she remembers the textbooks. Looking through them seems like a better option than trying to figure out what a class called “Alloys” has to do with magic, so she pulls them out one by one. At the very bottom of the box is something that doesn’t quite fit: an old leather-bound notebook that had seen better years. Its paper is yellowed with age and when Julia opens to the first page it’s handwritten in ink:

 

_The Magicians_

Book Six of _Fillory and Further_

 

With nothing else left to do for the morning Julia settles in to read. This story was different from the Fillory she remembered. Firstly, it was written by Jane. Second, it wasn’t really geared towards children anymore. The fifty or so handwritten pages detailed Jane’s return to Fillory to battle her lost brother, Martin, who has turned into a beast controlled by pure magic. The story ends with Jane receiving a silver pocket watch that can rewind time, and Jane goes on her merry way to (ostensibly) stop Martin from some unnamed evil.

 

Julia reaches the final page, which is signed in Jane’s now-recognizable scrawl. It's a little disappointing, but it was also a new mystery from the series that defined her childhood. Julia looks over to Kady, who’s pinning up various posters on the wall above her bed.

 

“How many textbooks did they give you?” Julia asks, but she isn’t sure what answer she’s hoping to hear.

 

“Um.” Kady counts the books spread across her desk. “Looks like there’s six. You?”

 

Julia counts seven.

 

“Six, too,” she lies. “These things are like bricks.”

 

\---

 

Weeks later when a man obscured by moths kills her professor and maims the Dean, the sixth Fillory book is possibly the furthest thing from Julia’s mind. Mostly she’s frozen and wondering if this is really how things end; if after all this wonder and pain she dies at 22 in a school that has hoodwinked her family into barely noticing her absence. Would anyone be able to push past the enchantment and miss her?

 

Suddenly she feels burning pain in her back and her knees and every joint that had been frozen— _I can move,_ she thinks dumbly, and looks wildly around the room to find some way to escape. It is then that she notices the silver watch held tightly in Quentin’s hand.

 

Kady is throwing a spell that Julia has never seen before but it’s the crack of her friend’s head hitting the desk that snaps her attention away from the watch, finally. The rest is just sounds; the soft flutter of dead moths hitting the floor, Alice’s fierce whisper in the unbelievable quiet, the Beast hissing and falling, the resounding crash of the glass finally breaking. And then, later, the roar of useless questions as the faculty rushes in.

 

\---

 

When she catches up to Quentin they’re all leaving and he’s already talking in low and panicked tones to Alice, who is doing her best to ignore him.

 

“We did that spell, okay?” he hisses, “You don’t get to pretend—”

 

Julia interrupts: “We all did that spell, Quentin. All of us. And we probably all feel like shit about this but if you keep panicking—”

 

“Glad to see you, kids— Nurse?” It’s Eliot, wearing a dressing gown and looking entirely too giddy for the type of day they’re having.

 

“Oh you poor thing,” Margo pouts, and then she’s taking Alice’s arm and tugging her away, leading the mismatched group across the lawn.

 

“It’s okay,” Eliot is explaining to Quentin from somewhere behind Julia. “We’ll just get you all a nice drink, or three. Jesus, you didn’t tell me you were _dangerous_...”

 

\---

 

They don’t have the privilege of trying the infamous signature cocktail, but the three first-years are on their way to being well-and-truly blitzed before Julia manages to get Quentin alone again. Alice has disappeared somewhere with Margo under the pretense of getting her into clothes that look slightly less “first Thanksgiving” and Julia isn’t going to waste the opportunity.

 

“So,” she hopes she isn’t slurring yet, it might ruin the serious tone she’s going for, “how the hell did you get that watch?”

 

Quentin struggles for a second to focus on her face but mostly just goes a little cross-eyed.

 

“The Dean,” he says by way of explanation, “it was his. Is his? I—I’m not sure, but I think I mater...ilized it. It unfroze everyone, so.”

 

He sighs and Julia can see the moment where he remembers why they’ve been drinking. She thinks what she’s about to tell him might lift his mood.

 

“Listen, Quentin, I’m not sure but, I think that watch isn’t from here?”

 

Quentin looks at her like she’s an idiot and she tries to rephrase.

 

“I think it might be from Fillory,” she says, and Quentin’s laugh is harsh and not actually amused at all.

 

“Yeah,” he says, “okay, sure. Now’s definitely the best time to make fun of me. Might as well add to a record-breaking shitty day.”

 

“No, Q, I’m serious,” Julia is realizing this may have been a terrible time to talk about Quentin’s lifelong obsession. “Just, tomorrow, when we’re sober? Come to my room. I need to show you something, this isn’t a prank.”

 

She looks to her friend and he’s nodding but in a moment his head droops to his chest and Julia is pretty sure he’s fallen asleep. _It’s a good thing classes are cancelled tomorrow_ , she thinks, and picks up her drink again. Alice is storming back down the stairs and Julia does the only thing that seems right:

 

“Hey!” she calls. “You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

 

Wordlessly, Alice sits beside her on the couch and pours herself a finger of scotch. When she tries to throw it back as a shot it goes down mostly the wrong way and she’s coughing and spluttering and Julia is laughing, and laughing.

 

“I’m not an experienced drinker,” Alice says, embarrassed.

 

Julia snorts.

 

“We’ll work on it,” she says, and pours Alice another. The other woman pushes her glasses further up on her nose like she’s preparing for battle and takes the tumbler.

 

\---

 

“So—holy shit,” is the first thing Quentin says upon closing the notebook.

 

“Yeah,” Julia agrees, and there there’s silence as Quentin’s mouth opens, shuts, opens again.

 

“How did you even get this?” he asks, sounding a little offended. Julia can’t really blame him; out of the two of them, Quentin was the only one to never give up on Fillory.

 

“It was mixed in with my textbooks. I thought it was someone’s idea of a joke until I saw you holding that silver pocket watch yesterday.”

 

Quentin is looking straight ahead at the wall but he isn’t seeing it, not really.

 

“I need...a minute,” he says quietly. “Can we just pause this for a second? I feel like this is why that expression exists—‘Don’t meet your heroes,’ you know? I just—I’ve waited my whole life for someone else to agree that Fillory might be real and I _need_... I need it not to be actually as fucked-up as it seems right now.”

 

He stands up from the bed and puts the notebook down with special care.

 

“Yeah, Quentin, whatever you need,” Julia says, and he takes that as his queue to go clear his head. Julia is left with a battered notebook, and a pounding headache, and an empty dorm room.

 

 _This hangover is kicking my ass_ , she thinks, and falls back onto the comforter.

 

\---

_Quentin withdraws in the next few weeks, disappearing to god-knows-where for hours at a time_. _Finally there is a day where he sits Julia down and tells her that they’re going to go to Fillory (as long as she’d like to come along)_. _In the face of her oldest friend offering her their oldest dream she’s pretty much helpless to resist_. _The answer lies, apparently, in a button._

_The trip to the Neitherlands happens in an instant and is a little anticlimactic after so much build-up. The adrenaline rush that Julia expected only comes when an electric blur of magic lances past her face_. _There is a group of four cloaked figures running towards them faster than she thinks should be possible, and as Julia turns and begins to throw up some sort of shield she can hear Quentin murmuring in what might have been archaic Latin_. _She thinks maybe he’ll save them after all but whatever the spell was supposed to do, it fizzles and dies at his fingertips and the interlopers are suddenly upon them_. _This time they die by plain old steel, as it turns out they haven’t yet learned a spell that can combat the blunt force of a shortsword_.

 

 

**Loop 7 – In which Margo gets involved**

“It’s time for some...Discipline,” is how Eliot greets Julia that morning. She’s sitting next to a toasted bagel that’s gone cold because she’d forgotten about it while trying to understand a theory-heavy passage in her textbook.

 

“Okay,” she says, taking it in stride. “Explain.”

 

Eliot obliges.

 

“It’s all very Harry Potter. There are practically an infinite number of Disciplines so all they really mean, when you get right down to it, are a kind of specialty. And we group them like houses. We,” he does a flourish with his hands here, “are the Physical Kids. Some of the rarest magic is physical magic, and if we don’t get a few of you this year the Dean has threatened to merge us with another house to save space.” He says this like it might be the actual end of his world.

 

“Which is bullshit!” Margo chimes in from a table away.

 

Eliot rolls his eyes. “Margo just doesn’t want to share her inevitable Welters victory with anyone else.”

 

“Welters?” Julia asks.

 

“Shit,” Eliot says quietly, “that was a mistake.”

 

Margo sits up a little straighter in her chair.

 

“You mean you’ve never played?” she asks, faking shock. Julia rolls her eyes.

 

“No, Margo, in my entire heretofore non-magical life I’ve never played whatever wizardly game Welters is.”

 

She scoffs and finally turns to face Julia, crossing her legs and folding her hands

 

“Welters is _everything_ ,” she insists. “It was invented about a million years ago to stop students from killing each other in duels. It’s a lot like chess, except—”

 

Julia loses focus as Margo drones on about the rules of Welters. Basically, Welters has a lot of rules but only some of them are important, and it’s pretty much a magical pissing contest when you get right down to it.

 

“All of this only matters, of course, if you’re placed in our house,” Margo concludes. “Participation is compulsory.”

 

It sounds like a threat.

 

“Good to know,” Julia says, hoping to whatever deity might hear that she isn’t placed on Margo’s team.

 

\---

 

At the end of a very tense 30 minutes the red-haired woman who’s been examining her announces:

 

“Well, it was almost a toss-up there for a minute there, between naturalism and physical magic, but I believe it’s definitely the latter for you. I recommend stopping by their...house, at some point soon.”

 

She says “house” with more than a little derision, but Julia is distracted with the thought of Margo and her inevitable iron rule.

 

“Well, thanks, I guess,” she says finally, and excuses herself. Quentin passes her on the way out and she gives him a goofy thumbs-up. He smiles weakly but doesn’t say anything before he’s out of sight.

 

\---

 

Julia see the house a moment before she notices Alice standing in front of the entrance.

 

“Is this it?” she asks. Alice nods but she’s too focused on a note taped to the door to respond.

 

_Physical kids:_

_Let yourself in! :)_

 

“Is it locked?” Julia asks, and then she realizes: “It’s a test.”

 

“To see if we can open the door,” Alice finally responds. “Or maybe just break through?”

 

“I am so. sick. of tests,” Julia groans.

 

“You’re at a school,” Alice reminds her, unsympathetic. She reaches out a hand to touch the wood; a spark leaps to her fingertips and she pulls back, swearing.

 

“This might actually be hard,” she says, and Julia gets the impression that Alice is a little excited. Or possibly impressed.

 

A few minutes wherein Alice tries a variety of vision spells and Julia stares angrily at the door, Alice speaks up again.

 

“I have a specialty called phosphoromancy; it’s a fancier way of saying I can bend light,” she says, “what’s yours?”

 

Julia thinks briefly of invisibility cloaks and that one private jet in the X-men movies but then she fumbles with the slip of paper the woman had handed her.

 

“Retrieval magic,” she replies. “So I guess I find things. Like this house, not that it helped.”

 

Alice hums. “Have you read Teukolsky yet?”

 

“Yeah, most of it,” Julia says. “Why, is there something in there that could help us break in?”

 

“Not exactly,” Alice says. “I just...might need your help with something later.”

 

That seems to be the end of her explanation. She’s moved on to an odd hand gesture that looks like she’s holding a speck of sand in the air with her first two fingers. Her other digits splay out in a fan, and she’s twisting her hand. The faintest wisp of smoke curls up from the wood of the door and Alice sighs.

 

“I don’t think bending light is going to help with this,” she admits, but Julia has an idea.

 

“Wait,” she says, “Can you do that same thing but make it stronger? Like a magnifying glass?”

 

“I can try,” Alice says.

 

\---

 

Cheers erupt when Julia reaches a hand through the charred ring of wood and unlocks the door. She realizes she’s grinning, and Alice even has a small smile on her face. They take a moment to let the music wash over them before Margo breezes by them, yelling.

 

“What took you so long? I’m starving!”

 

Julia flicks her off, and then feels an arm land heavily on her shoulder.

 

“Hey nerd,” Kady says. She looks honestly happy, and more than a little drunk if the melting ice in her empty glass is any indicator. Julia turns fully to hug her and Kady is laughing and pulling Alice in as well.

 

When they break apart she asks: “Physical magic too? I thought we were supposed to be rare.”

 

“Battle magic, bitches,” is how Kady explains herself. “It figures that the one thing I’m good at is banned at this shitty school. And pretty much everywhere else, too.”

 

“Wait— are you telling me that you’re intimidating?” Julia says in mock surprise. Kady shoves her shoulder lightly.

 

Eliot chooses then to meander over with two seafoam-green cocktails in absinthe glasses.

 

“Welcome,” he says around the joint in his mouth, “to our gracious abode.”

 

He turns on his heel and leaves. Alice takes a sip of her drink and almost chokes. When she puts it down Julia picks it back up and puts it in her hand.

 

“C’mon, genius,” she says, swaying to hip-check Alice. “Study up. No one got good at drinking in one night.”

 

“Practice makes perfect,” Kady chimes in.

 

\---

 

 _There’s a reason it’s called “the green fairy”_ Julia thinks the next morning, _that little fucker is just crashing around my head right now_.

 

She’s on a couch, at least, so that’s already an improvement on some of her undergrad experiences. Kady is on the couch too, but the opposite end. Their legs are tangled under a blanket and they’re both wearing the same clothes from the day before.

 

Bits and pieces of the night come back to her. The clearest memory she has is of Kady swiping an entire bottle of champagne and dragging her out to the back patio to sit on the stone wall. She can’t remember exactly what they talked about but she knows it was about family. That in itself is a little concerning; Julia did not have the most sparkling of childhoods, and from what she can remember from last night neither did Kady. Brakebills, it seems, was a sanctuary for both of them.

 

Kady begins to stir and then stops. Julia sees one of her hands work its way out from under the blanket and contort itself into a spell for reducing nausea. Even with her headache, Julia can’t help but laugh.

 

“Shut up,” Kady mumbles through the mane of curls that is mostly obscuring her face. “I _will_ magic missile your face.”

 

The threat lacks any sort of substance.

 

“I’m going to find Alice,” Julia whispers, and makes her way upstairs. She has to step over more than a dozen unconscious forms in various states of debauchery, but the last memory she has of Alice is her disappearing upstairs with Margo and some wine, so it seems like a good place to start.

 

The rooms upstairs are arranged in a long corridor with hand-drawn signs on each door naming their inhabitants. Margo’s door has been decorated within an inch of its life and is by far the easiest to spot. She raps on the frame and leans her weight on the wall of the hallway. Shuffling sounds can be heard from within the room before there’s the _click_ of a lock being opened and the door swings inward. Margo is wearing an oversized hoodie and probably (hopefully) underwear, and she looks both more casual than Julia has ever seen her and also more annoyed.

 

“What,” she bites out. Julia is about to ask her where Alice disappeared to last night when the plush duvet on Margo’s bed stirs and a disheveled head of blonde hair lifts off the pillow. Alice slowly sits up, and the way she pulls the cover swiftly to her chin kind of gives away what the two might have gotten up to the night before. The wine bottle on the bed-stand is corked and not nearly as empty as Julia expected.

 

“Good morning,” Alice says stiffly. She’s having trouble meeting either of their gazes.

 

Margo rolls her eyes.

 

“You’re welcome,” she says to Alice. Then she turns to face Julia again.

 

“She’s safe, we’re adults, and I am not in the habit of explaining myself so that’s all you’re gonna get,” Margo says in a voice pitched too softly for Alice to hear. More loudly she says:

 

“Oh! And I’ll see you at Welters practice today at 4.”

 

The door slams shut.

 

“Fuck,” Julia says empathetically.

 

\---

 

 

“This is not. a. game,” is how Margo greets the assembled students who’ve shown up at the Welters field. The afternoon light gives a weird glow to the dull slate of the black squares and sparkles prettily off of the few water squares positioned at just the right angle.

 

“You will bleed,” Eliot chimes in menacingly at Margo’s side, attempting and failing to look disinterested.

 

It seems like Margo only managed to press-gang a handful of the freshman into playing, with the addition of her best friend. Everyone stands in a loose semi-circle, and most are looking at their enthusiastic leader with mixed levels of interest, except for Alice, who is taking turns staring at Margo unblinkingly and looking at her polished shoes.

 

“We have a perfect record to maintain, and this is the year we’re going to impress the shit out of every mentor in the stands. If you jeopardize that I _will_ commit felonies.”

 

Even Julia was a little intimidated by the manic gleam in Margo’s eyes.

 

“From now until the match this weekend, your asses are ours,” Eliot drawls. “There will be no distractions!”

 

“Says the guy who accessorizes with a flask,” Kady quips, just a little too loudly. Eliot breaks his straight-man routine and chuckles, passing the aforementioned item her way.

 

“It never empties,” he admits conspiratorially. Kady shrugs and takes a pull.

 

“You mixed a cocktail just to put it into a flask?” she asks, impressed despite herself.

 

 Julia holds out her hand expectantly and Kady happily passes it over. The liquor she swallows tastes like upper-shelf scotch.

 

“And it changes to suit the drinker, apparently.”

 

“I love magic,” Eliot sighs.

 

“People!” Margo claps her hands. “If I could take your attention away from your future alcoholism for a second...let’s get to work.”

 

“I agree with Margo,” Alice finally pipes up. “Mentors are supposed to be our keys to a successful future when we graduate.”

 

“Finally, someone who understands common sense,” Margo says exasperatedly, but she seems pleased with Alice’s support all the same.

 

\---

 

After five afternoons of Welters practice Julia never wants to see the arena again. Nightmares of slate tiles crushing her have begun to crop up, and Kady doesn’t have the heart to tease her about waking up in the middle of the night with half-formed Old Germanic consonants tumbling out of her mouth, her hands twisted up in the sheets.

 

As expected, Margo has been doing a fantastic impression of a drill sergeant. Saturday morning dawns bright and cold and Julia feels at least slightly prepared to face the Nature Magic team. They’re probably a bunch of anti-competition pacifists anyway, right?

 

When the teams file in Julia is shocked to see a familiar face on the opposing side.

 

“Quentin!” she hisses. He looks up.

 

“You have physical magic?” he asks.

 

“You’re a _naturalist?_ ” Julia shoots back. Quentin is shaking his head.

 

“No, I’m—I didn’t test into anything in particular, but the Naturalist’s Den had extra rooms this year, so,” he trails off. Julia feels kind of terrible for not having tracked him down in the week since the tests, but if he’d had to deal with Margo’s single-minded rule he’d probably understand.

 

 _He’s sad_ , Julia suddenly realizes. Not depressed, because Quentin wore depression like other people wear their favorite sweatshirt (worn and comfortable and ever-present). Something was wrong, and Julia had been too wrapped up in her own stress to even notice. Was it the lack of a test conclusion? It seems bigger, heavier than that.

 

“Q, what happened?” she asks. He starts, as if he’s surprised that she’s noticed. If possible, it makes her feel even shittier.

 

“My dad,” he says. “He’s...it’s brain cancer?” Quentin phrases it like a question, like he’s asking permission to be upset about this. Julia knows that he and his dad have never been close, but this was a universal kind of ache. Emotions never really play by the rules (she would know). She closes the few steps between them and they’re hugging, and Margo is yelling behind her to stop fraternizing with the enemy.

 

“We’ll talk more after?” she asks. He nods but he seems beyond talking.

 

 _The game is going smoothly and the Physical Kids are three squares ahead of the Naturalists_. _On Quentin’s turn his eyes are blank and he begins a spell that Julia only half-recognizes_. _She can hear Alice’s sharp intake of breath and a whisper of “He can’t do that, he won’t be able to—” before a small black circle completely devoid of color opens up between Quentin’s hands_. _It quickly grows and with it comes a raging wind_. _It howls and tears through the lofted room, and Julia can hear screaming in the stands, but no one wants to abandon their spaces on the board_.

 

 _“Quentin!” Alice is yelling, “You need to stop! You can’t control this!” She begins trying to cast something to combat the force of the void from where she’s standing and for a moment it seems like the storm might abate but then the it returns with force_. _Alice swears and then she’s running towards Quentin and repeating the incantation_. _Julia leaves her square as well, thinking that there might be a way for her to bring back his focus_. _When she is about to reach him, she hears cracking timber_.

 

 _Julia has a second to realize that it’s the sound of the roof caving in, before something falls on her from above_.


	3. we are a fever, we ain't born typical

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julia leans in and closes the space between them so that their shoulders bump together. She feels the warmth of the contact through the thin layer of her shirt and she knows it’s only in her head, but Julia feels the touch as though she’s been burned. 
> 
> Slowly, tentatively, Kady lowers her head so that it rests in the crook of Julia’s neck.
> 
> Julia forgets to breathe.
> 
> It’s the kind of moment that she isn’t really equipped to deal with, along with the sudden swooping sensation in the bottom of her stomach. 
> 
> (It’s the kind of moment that’s always interrupted, this time by the loud bang of Margo kicking the back door of the house open, yelling with glee: “Come along plebes, your third trial awaits!”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh god, this took forever and a half I am the WORST. Um, my only excuse is I work a lot and also a friend of mine died right around when episode 3 of this season aired so I was in a funk for...a while.  
> But anyway, I'm mostly functioning again. This chapter was stupidly long so I had to split it into parts; it's getting harder to write only short drabbles for these loops soooo, sorry about it I guess. But the good news is chapter 4 should be coming really soon!  
> Chapter title from the song "U R A Fever" by The Kills, and I don't own anything, etc, etc.
> 
> Enjoy!

**Loop 8 – In which greater truths are shared, and something odd begins**

 

The thing that Julia keeps forgetting is that, in the simplest terms, magic and the people that practice it are the _worst_.

 

Somewhere in the whirlwind of her first semester at Brakebills she lets the relative safety of study and rote memorization lull her into a false sense of security. It’s because of this that Julia’s abduction catches her completely by surprise. She’d heard of the Trials in whispered voices but had written them off as another hyper-dramatic student account, meant to intimidate and haze. As with a lot of things she’d assumed about the school, Julia finds herself to be woefully wrong.

 

The Physical Kid’s cottage is quieter than usual but Julia hadn’t taken notice. Eventually every party came to an end, probably, even when absinthe was involved. It was late; the sun had set hours ago, but she wasn’t quite up to making the walk back to her dorm room. Instead she meanders out to the front stoop and with a casual snap of her fingers the cigarette dangling from her lips is lit and the red of the cherry burns almost too brightly in the darkness. She stares at it anyway between drags, watching the gyre of smoke curl up and away in the windless night.

 

Julia has a moment to recognize the soft sound of footsteps coming closer in the house behind her before the door swings inwards and a bag is unceremoniously pulled down over her head. She gets a vicious kick in to whoever is standing behind her and hears a muffled “Dammit, Julia,” and then she smells Eliot’s stupidly expensive cologne and relaxes.

 

“What the fuck are you doing, Eliot,” she demands. Someone else is pulling at her shoulders, trying to guide her down the porch steps, and Julia would bet money that it’s Margo.

 

“The broody Ivy-league sacrifice has offered herself!” Margo crows. Hidden under the bag, Julia rolls her eyes.

 

“So funny, you guys. This is great,” she says flatly. No one responds, except for Margo giving her an strong shove forward. 

 

\---

 

Julia stumbles when Eliot unceremoniously rips the canvas sack off of her head. She’s standing between Penny and Kady, and further down the row of freshman she can spot Quentin and Alice.

 

Everyone else is in some state of undress; Penny is shirtless under his robe, and Kady wears a nightgown with a slit that goes up her thigh far enough that Julia catches herself trying to figure out if the black hemline that’s just barely visible is from shorts or underwear. She tears her eyes away and notices that Quentin is actually barefoot. Jesus.

 

 _Great,_ she thinks, _so it’s a slumber party_.

 

It’s then that a hooded figure with a ridiculous mask steps to the front of the crowd. When the mask is dramatically lifted, Eliot’s grinning face is underneath.

 

“Hello first years,” he begins, sounding entirely too happy for Julia’s peace of mind.

 

\---

 

It’s another goddamn test. Julia could scream, except it would probably be considered cheating. She’s assigned to a table with Kady and a quiet girl with crutches, Gretchen, who comes off as intelligent but generally uninterested in her other tablemates.

 

“Anyone who's secretly a code-breaker, now would be the time to speak up. What language even is this?" Kady says, after looking over the spell they’re meant to decipher. It’s gibberish; maybe 18th century Englishmen encrypted it, but there was such a bizarre mix of Cyrillic, Germanic, and Slavic dialects that it was pretty much useless.

 

“Eliot said it was practically impossible,” Julia says, “not completely. There’s always a trick, you just have to...” she trails off, lost for a moment in thought.

 

 _Impossible_.

 

“Well don’t leave me hanging, Jules,” Kady says. She’s sounding more frustrated by the minute.

 

“We need to cheat,” Julia says, probably too loudly.

 

Slowly, Kady’s lips pull into a Cheshire grin.

 

“Babe, those are the magic words,” she says.

 

\---

 

It’s not actually as hard as Julia expected; she watches Quentin and Penny flail for a few minutes across the room. Quentin thinks he's being subtle, but she’s always been able to tell when he’s up to something. When Penny finally returns, Julia has an idea of what they need to do.

 

“Bessel’s Mimicry,” she says.

 

“Okay,” Kady says slowly, “but who? Alice?”

 

Julia shakes her head. “Too obvious. Everyone knows she’s the only one with a hope of figuring this out. But Q and Penny are up to something. When they start writing, you focus on Penny. I’ll take Quentin.”

 

It was one of the simplest physical spells they’d learned, and it was usually just a way to practice manipulation magic. If you focused the spell on a person, you would imitate their physical actions for as long as you could focus. It had disastrous results as a party trick, especially with drunk grad students, but it was their best bet.

 

When Quentin’s pen touched his paper, Julia maneuvers her left hand into the practiced positions below the table, while her right hand begins scribbling across the page in Quentin’s exact scrawl.

 

 _Let’s hope no one is great at recognizing handwriting_ , she thinks.

 

\---

 

Eliot hovers over the metal bowl, making a point to hem and haw until Kady snaps.

 

“Are you going to light it or do you need me to do it for you?”

 

Eliot sighs and drops the match. The flame burns brilliantly, exactly the shade of green the description entailed. He sniffs.

 

“Congratulations,” he drawls, “you’ve passed. But if you thought I wouldn’t notice that you cheated, you’re mistaken.”

 

He pauses a beat. Panic rises in Julia’s chest, a flood of sick heat that almost has her babbling out excuses, begging for a second chance. How could she have misread—

 

He smiles. “On to the second trial, all of you.”

 

Julia could punch him. Kady looks like she might.

 

\---

The celebration that night rages later even than most other Physical parties. Julia sits with Quentin and Alice and Kady, but Q is distracted with teaching Alice the difference between two equally tricky shuffles. He keeps dropping the cards, and an increasingly tipsy Alice giggles more each time. Eventually Quentin gives up, putting the deck down on the table and making an excuse to leave. Alice is leaning heavily into the plush cushions of the sofa, trying to keep her eyes open and failing miserably.

 

Kady’s been quiet, staring at the champagne bottle on the table. A single bead of condensation rolls down the greenish glass and is interrupted by Kady’s hand, because she grabs the bottle by the neck and stands abruptly. With a tilt of her head, her hair bouncing with the movement and looking far too playful, she motions for Julia to follow her.

 

Julia pulls a throw blanket over Alice’s now-sleeping form and follows Kady up the stairs. They’d been roommates before the Discipline tests and didn’t see any reason to change it when the school had made them relocate to the cottage. Julia tried not to think about relationships too closely (it’s worked so far with her and Quentin, but for slightly different reasons) but she couldn’t see herself living with anyone other than Kady. Miraculously, they just kind of... _fit_. It was probably better not to examine why too closely. Or at least, that’s what she’d been telling herself lately.

 

Lost in thought, she almost walks right into Kady when her roommate stops just inside the doorway to their room.

 

“So, glasses?” she asks. Julia makes a face.

 

“Straight from the source, then,” Kady says, laughing. She takes a long pull from the champagne bottle. Julia watches her throat work, noticing the contrast between the pink of Kady’s lips and the green of the bottle. She swallows hard, mouth suddenly dry. Kady hands over the bottle.

 

After having a few more gulps than she’d originally planned, Julia figured it was a good idea to open the window to let some air in— the room was suddenly uncomfortably warm. Kady is sprawled on her bed, feet dangling off the edge of the mattress.

 

“I feel like I’m in some kind of sorority,” she says, “with all of these fucking tests. And the _robes_.”

 

She scoffs. Julia can feel a smile tugging at her lips.

 

“Yeah... the masks really didn’t help,” she agrees. She drops down onto the bed next to Kady and kicks her shoes off. A breeze spills through the window, and in spite of the weird delayed seasons of Brakebills Julia can feel an autumnal crispness to the air. It’s nice, and it helps cut through the haze settling over her.

 

“What do you think the next one might be?” she finally asks. Kady bites her lip absently, thinking.

 

“I just hope it isn’t at a desk. If they’re going to really test us, we can’t keep doing everything from books, you know?”

 

Julia hums in agreement. They fall into a comfortable silence and Julia’s mind wanders again. She has the strangest sense of deja-vu—they’re in a bed like this but it’s not quite the same; the covers are pulled up and over them both and they’re closer than they’ve ever been. (Julia is so sad but just so, so comfortable for the first time in ages. There’s an arm wrapped around her and she is warm and safe and also, strangely, nervous.)

 

She shakes her head; the memory makes no sense. It never happened—it’s already fading. Kady is looking at her oddly but Julia feels like she’s underwater. Where had it come from?

 

“You okay?” Kady asks. She says it casually but Julia can hear genuine concern.

 

“Just some weird memories,” Julia says. “Like we’ve been here before. I think this is going straight to my head.”

 

She gestures towards the bottle, laughing it off, but Kady is propping herself up on the mattress.

 

“What, in my bed?” Her grin is feral but her eyes are guarded. “You wish.”

 

There’s a challenge in there, somewhere. Julia wants to know why Kady sounds so defensive when she says it. She wants to know a lot of things, but words are getting harder. Vaguely she thinks it must be the champagne. She tries to ignore how full the bottle still is, where it rests on the bedstand.

 

“Duh,” Julia says, smirking. She’s never been one to back down. Julia tries to summon the memory that had just derailed her but it’s gone, slipping through her fingers like water. She wants to chase the feeling it gave her. The room still feels warm and the colors are bleeding together; Julia’s heart is racing in her chest and it occurs to her that none of this, _none_ of this is normal.

 

“Was that champagne drugged?” is the last coherent thought she has before the room tilts violently on its axis and everything is plunged into darkness.

 

\---

 

She wakes up in the woods.

 

When her head stops spinning Julia’s first thought is: _Right, trials— plural_.

Eliot sits at a table, giggles at her expense, picks at hors d’oeuvres. Eventually he hands Julia an axe and tells her to catch a horse.

 

Julia thinks it’s less “catching” and more “killing” if you have to do it with an axe, but she’s not exactly in a position to complain.

 

\---

 

An hour into stumbling through the undergrowth Julia hears the unmistakable sound of someone crashing through bramble at high speed. Kady tears past her, her eyes wild, holding a net.

 

“Kady?” she says. “Kady!”

 

No response, and Kady is sprinting haphazardly towards the edge of the small clearing Julia stands in. She runs after her roommate and grabs her arm to stop her, but Kady spins in place and Julia realizes she’s crying.

 

“Stop it, no, no, stop it—I have to get the bird!”

 

Kady (stoic, nonchalant, combat-boot-wearing _Kady_ ) is hysterical, and Julia at least can understand this, can understand how sometimes your lungs decide not to work right and it feels like your world is caving in.

 

“ _Kady_. Look at me, okay? I need you to breathe with me, alright? Breathe in, I’m going to count, just do what I do.”

 

Her eyes are still glazed and she is trying to twist her arm away but Kady is looking at Julia like she is the last lifeboat on a sinking ship and Julia can’t do anything but breathe, and count, and hope that this can help with someone else’s panic attacks like it did with her own. She’s still holding Kady by the wrist but after the first count of eight, while they hold lungfulls of air deep in their bellies like a secret that can’t be told, she moves her hand to twine their fingers together. As they exhale Kady grips tight enough that Julia feels it in her bones, imagines the joints creaking with the weight of it.

 

\---

 

It’s later but Julia can’t tell how much time has passed because the branches overhead blot out the sun. They’re sitting on the forest floor and Kady is quietly telling Julia why she can’t ( _can’t_ ) fail out of Brakebills. Julia tries not to notice they’re still holding hands, because it’s beyond irrelevant to what’s going on right now.

 

Then there’s the crunch of footsteps, more than one set, and Penny ducks around a barberry bush with a smirk stretching across his lips. It falls when he takes in Kady’s tear-streaked face, and he stops short. Julia can hear Quentin yelp from behind the bush as he crashes into Penny’s back, but his pause gives Kady time to wipe a sleeve across her face and clear away most of her streaked mascara.

 

(Julia has a feeling Penny did it on purpose, even if he’d never admit it.)

 

“Hey losers,” he says, “You’re late to the party. C’mon.”

 

He lazily waves an arm, gesturing for them to follow. Not seeing any better option, the girls get up, brush themselves off, and trail after him.

 

\---

 

They make it through the trial, once their tools are all swapped. Julia, it turns out, didn’t need a tool at all. Penny had been told to find eyebright, but as a Floridian native he had absolutely no idea what the hell it was. Luckily, Julia had gone through a naturalist phase as a child and could still pick out wild medicinal plants from memory (especially brightly colored flowering ones).

 

There’s a party, because of course there’s a party. Penny breaks off from the group immediately after they return, with a muttered excuse about not wanting to hang out in a frat house. Julia knows it’s really because they are all too loud and too open for him to handle when the entire house is projecting that many drunken thoughts.

 

Kady is quieter than usual. Even an hour into the celebration Julia hasn’t seen her touch the drink that sits (melting ice and all) on the coffee table in front of her. She notices Julia staring, she must, but Kady still focuses on the warped image of wood grain reflected through her glass and grips the cushion of the couch a little too tightly. Julia sits down just inches away, close but not touching, and tries to seem relaxed.

 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, finally. Julia shrugs, takes a sip of her drink and puts it down carefully.

 

“I’m not gonna ask you to,” she replies. Julia leans in and closes the space between them so that their shoulders bump together. She feels the warmth of the contact through the thin layer of her shirt and she knows it’s only in her head, but Julia feels the touch as though she’s been burned.

 

Slowly, tentatively, Kady lowers her head so that it rests in the crook of Julia’s neck.

 

Julia forgets to breathe.

 

It’s the kind of moment that she isn’t really equipped to deal with, along with the sudden swooping sensation in the bottom of her stomach.

 

(It’s the kind of moment that’s always interrupted, this time by the loud bang of Margo kicking the back door of the house open, yelling with glee: “Come along plebes, your third trial awaits!”)

 

\---

 

Julia is naked. She is cold and self-conscious and very, very naked. Somewhere in the back of her mind a stray thought rears its head, whining _They couldn’t have planned this shit according to the season?_

 

“So...rope, right?”

 

It’s the first thing Kady has said since they got to the clearing and started stripping. She is looking at the patch of grass slightly to the left of Julia’s right foot and pink is dusted high across her cheekbones (and her shoulders, and lower—Julia should probably stop looking but it’s _hard_ ).

 

“Come on, we’ll do you first,” Julia says, and waits. Kady finally meets her eyes and just one brow is arched delicately.

 

 _There she is_ , Julia thinks, and she grins. Kady huffs out a sigh and holds her wrists forward but she can’t help but mutter _Wow, Jules, didn’t know you had it in you_ and Julia laughs lowly.

 

“It’s always the quiet ones, or something like that?”

 

Kady is still looking at her but this time Julia is the one that can’t make eye contact.

 

“Something like that,” she replies, and gets started on Julia’s ropes.

 

\---

 

They’ve reached a lull in conversation. Julia’s almost run out of childhood baggage to confess and maybe so has Kady, it’s hard to tell.

 

(There are ten minutes left until midnight.)

 

“I used to tell my friends my mom was dead,” Kady says. “She was never around anyway and I’d rather people thought she was dead than think she just didn’t care.”

It’s Julia’s turn—they’d decided hours ago that taking turns would make the whole thing a lot less awkward

 

“Brakebills is everything I thought it would be, and it scares me how much I love this. All of it—I’m afraid of what it would do to me if I don’t pass these trials,” she confesses. Kady bites her lip, nods almost like she doesn’t realize she’s doing it at all.

 

(Five minutes.)

 

“I lied, when I said I was naturally good at physical magic,” she mumbles, then louder: “I’ve been a practicing hedge since I could walk, practically.”

 

Kady’s chin is raised defiantly, like she’s daring Julia to pass judgement. Like Julia could ever judge someone for doing anything they could to make that kind of energy race through their veins.

 

“Everyone in my family is addicted to something. I always thought it’d skipped me, but maybe it was just waiting for the first spell that worked. This might be the thing that destroys me,” Julia admits. She can feel the ropes loosen but she doesn’t let them fall, not yet.

 

Kady chuffs out a laugh— it’s short on humor. There’s a long beat of silence while Julia waits.

 

“I’ve been lying about myself for so long that I’m not sure how to stop,” she whispers.

 

(Two minutes)

 

“So tell me something real,” Julia says, as if it’s that simple. As if they haven’t been trying to do just that all night. Kady searches her eyes, looking for something. Julia doesn’t know if she finds it. She’s too busy noticing how much closer they’re standing than where they’d started out. She could twitch her hand forward and it might meet Kady’s hip.

 

Kady looks at the watch resting on a rock beside them and Julia can see the moment she steels herself, before surging forward.

 

Their lips connect more softly than she’d thought possible and Julia can feel Kady’s hands shaking where they’re clasped between them, still tangled in rope that is slowly uncoiling. She frees one and traces her fingers up Julia’s arm, resting them finally at the wisps of hair at the back of her neck. Julia sighs into the kiss and it’s only then she realizes she’d been holding her breath. Her hands make their way to Kady’ hips and flex lightly, and she can feel Kady’s mouth pull into a smile against her own. After a soft bite to her lower lip (coaxing a groan from Julia that is more than a little embarrassing), Kady pulls away.

 

“So not to be a killjoy, but I feel like getting you naked before doing this is a little backwards,” she says. Julia giggles—actually _giggles_ , and is about to shoot back a snarky reply when Kady doubles over in pain.

 

“What the fuck, Kady—are you okay?” she asks, an edge of panic in her voice.

 

Then she feels the molten shift of her own bones, and loses the power of speech altogether as feathers begin to poke their way through her skin.

 

_The flight to Antarctica is rigorous in any time of the year, but as the flock of freshman students head steadily south, their magic-dosed geese brains don’t fully recognize the dangers of a brewing thunderstorm off the coast of Venezuela. A devastating barrage of hail knocks Quentin out of the sky first. Next to go are Julia and Kady, who were flying almost wingtip-to-wingtip when a bolt of lightning arcs through their formation. Alice and Penny are the only two to make it to Brakebills South._

_Far away, sitting comfortably in her study at Brakebills, Jane realizes she must once again reset time. She makes a note: ask the Dean to plan the trials for a week earlier—to avoid the nasty weather._


	4. when the sweet words and fevers all leave us, right here in the cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So after my computer crashed and I lost most of what I'd written beyond chapter 3 I kinda got derailed in writing this BUT eventually I found the motivation to rewrite most of what I'd had on my hard drive before. Credit to Lorde for the lyrics of the chapter title. As always I love any comments and kudos y'all wanna leave so go nuts. Thanks for reading =]

**Loop 9 – In which Marina returns**

 

Julia stares at the badly painted ceiling of her assigned room. The ceiling, as expected, is as unremarkable as the rest of the space. It only serves to remind her of how much she hated living in her dorm room as a freshman.

 

Julia’s side of the room has her single luggage case cracked open on the floor, sheets pulled haphazardly over the twin-sized cot she’d chosen. The other half of the room is even emptier, and Julia wonders for the third time in an hour when the hell her roommate is going to come through the door. The vinyl of the bare mattress is somewhere between blue and green, in the ugliest way possible.

 

Sighing, Julia gets to her feet. If she can’t be a welcoming party, at least she might be able to find Quentin. The heavy door swings shut behind her as she leaves, and as she rounds the corner she sees a blur of red hair and dark clothing before someone shoulder-checks her and she’s tripping into the wall of the hallway.

 

“Excuse you,” the woman says, without looking backwards. Julia stares after her for a moment before turning to continue down the hall, but hears the _click_ of her stilettos receding down the hallway for much longer.

 

\---

 

Julia finds Quentin outside of the library, looking like he’s too afraid to actually go inside. She can relate, a little. The feeling that this all might be a dream is hard to escape, but she pulls him by the hand until they’re back out in the sunshine and he gets a little of the color back into his face. Julia has learned by now that sometimes the only thing Quentin needed was to think a little _less._ They wander around the campus and can’t help but notice how the air is heavy with humidity and heat. Autumn hasn’t come to Brakebills yet, but there’s no one around who isn’t just as confused about the phenomenon as they are. Quentin is jittery but excited, asking Julia about Fillory and other theoreticals in a way he hasn’t since high school. Julia wonders if their fight from the morning is actually forgotten or just biding its time. It feels like it happened a lifetime ago. When the mosquitoes decide to come out they finally call an end to their explorations, heading back to their respective dorms.

 

Julia fumbles with the key for a moment when she reaches her door. The lock casing is loose and there’s a trick to getting the handle to turn that she’ll have to practice later, but after a moment she manages it and triumphantly shoulders the door open. In the hours between when she’d left and now Julia had honestly forgotten about her roommate dilemma, but when she looks to the previously empty half of the room she sees a familiar figure seated at the desk.

 

“Oh hey,” she says, her voice heavy with sarcasm, “Thanks for the body slam earlier. Great introduction.”

 

The woman turns, but only after waiting a beat. Intelligent eyes flicker over Julia from head to toe and then roll upwards, unimpressed. She turns back to the textbook she was reading. From the bed a dozing cat raises its head and mews in a way that suggests she’s equally bored.

 

When it becomes clear that her roommate doesn’t plan on responding, Julia sits heavily at her own desk chair and begins unloading textbooks from her bag. The silence is awkward and heavy until the cat decides to venture from her nest onto Julia’s desk and despite her best efforts she finds herself scratching absentmindedly between its ears.

 

“Et tu, Cupcake?” an amused drawl comes from over Julia’s shoulder. Julia laughs despite herself.

 

“Cupcake? Inspired,” she says, and she hears a huff of a laugh from the other desk. She leans closer to the cat and says conversationally: “Hello Cupcake, my name is Julia.”

 

There’s a beat of silence and then her roommate says “My name is Marina. Andrieski. Are we done with the elementary school icebreakers now, or...?”

 

Julia twists around in her chair and tries to affect a scowl but it’s hard to glare at someone whose eyeliner is apparently fucking _flawless_. Without really meaning to she picks apart the name.

 

 _Derived from Marinus; woman of the sea_ , she thinks absently. Marina’s eyes are a piercing and scrutinizing blue.

 

 _How fitting_.

 

\---

 

Weeks pass, and Julia is so caught up in the mind-numbingly repetitive task of learning introductory magic that she barely notices how seldom her roommate is actually in their room.

 

(But she still notices.)

 

When Marina does return it’s often past midnight, and most days she’s dressed to kill and leaving in the morning just as Julia is starting to stir in bed. It’s not as though Julia misses her, but she’s intensely curious as to where Marina is going for the day, because she’s never in any of Julia’s classes.

 

Julia finally sees Marina during lessons on a Tuesday afternoon in the last week of September. She is leaving Professor March’s room and almost misses a familiar figure conducting a hushed conversation in one of the study alcoves. Julia stops just out of view but at the edge of the stone wall she sees a glimpse of curly dark hair and a surly posture. It’s a sarcastic student from her year that she couldn’t quite name. Karly? Kady?

 

“You _owe_ me,” Marina hisses, and Julia can hear a scoff.

 

“You’re here too now. You don’t need me to do your dirty work anymore, and at Brakebills your tired Hedge-Bitch-in-Charge act isn’t worth jack.”

 

“Oh? Do you think Hannah feels the same way? It’s been a while since we talked, maybe I should give her a call...”

 

There’s silence, but Julia can hear a measured exhale.

 

“You think it’s worth getting wiped again just to get back at me? Face it, Marina—you’re just as caged as the rest of us now.”

 

Julia manages to whirl and start walking in the other direction just as the clunk of Kali’s boots make it into the hallway. She’s sure she’s made it far enough away when she hears a sharp call from behind her.

 

“You aren’t nearly as stealthy as you think you are.”

 

Julia freezes, and waits for Marina to catch up.

 

“You know, I like you,” she says after a moment. Julia raises an eyebrow.

 

“Thanks?” She isn’t sure where this is going but she feels inexplicably like a rabbit about to be snared.

 

“You’ve got that ivy-league naivety, but you’re losing it quickly. Which is good. Sparkly things never stay untarnished here for very long,” she says, like she’s bestowing a compliment.

 

“Great,” Julia says flatly, and starts walking. Marina keeps pace but on her the rapid stride seems graceful somehow, determined.

 

“This isn’t my first time through this hellhole.”

 

That stops Julia in her tracks. The hallway is deserted but she feels the need to whisper anyway.

 

“You—what? What the fuck does that mean?”

 

Marina smirks but it looks twisted somehow.

 

“I was expelled, three months before graduation. Do you know, if you’re dismissed as a student Brakebills doesn’t just kick you out. It takes back everything it gave you.”

 

“Oh yeah? What, like, your magic gets taken away?”

 

Marina laughs but there’s no humor in it.

 

“As good as. No, _sweetie_ , they take you into a special room off the Dean’s office and remove every memory you’ve made here. Every single magical thing you learned—amputated. If you’re lucky you might have a vague recollection of the entrance exam, but usually that goes too.”

 

Julia can feel a chill race down her spine. She can’t imagine giving up the feeling she gets when doing a spell successfully. The idea of an attack so personal...

 

“So how are you back here?”

 

“I was invited,” Marina answers, shrugging. “Your guess is as good as mine. But I’ll be damned if I have to spend three more years here. No, I have something a little more... expedited, in mind.”

 

Julia says nothing, but maybe her expression does the talking for her. Marina’s smile grows.

 

“When they take your memories, they store them. Somewhere in the school.”

 

\---

 

 _Somewhere in the school_.

 

The conversation stalks Julia’s thoughts for weeks. She’s pretty sure she knows what keeps Marina busy most days, now. Julia can’t even blame her. What she doesn’t understand is why the Dean asked her back in the first place. And on the same note, she wants to know what Marina did to get expelled to begin with.

 

Classes for first years move slowly and Julia has never been able to do slow very well. She gets far enough ahead that she’s often paired with a classmate who’s an actual genius. But Alice is distant and driven in a completely different way than Julia. The talent that comes naturally to her doesn’t instill excitement. Instead, it only seems to agitate her further. For a while Julia tries to get Alice to open up, just a little. She’s used to withdrawn, brilliant people. But every trick she’d use to get Quentin talking falls short, so eventually Julia and Alice settle into a quiet but civil study partnership. It’s disappointing.

 

To keep busy Julia finds herself reading increasingly difficult texts from the library. There are so many languages she needs to learn to ever be on the level she wants to be, so she studies with the focus of one possessed.

 

On a night close to Halloween, Julia is up hours past curfew and is practicing spoken Sumerian by candlelight when she hears muffled footsteps from the stacks nearby. She almost jumps out of her skin before Marina comes into view.

 

“Hey, creepy,” She says, peering over Julia’s shoulder to see what she was reading.

 

“If you’re translating anything after 2000 B.C. you’ll want the Akkadian primer, too,” she suggests, and turns to leave.

 

“Wait,” Julia calls, not exactly sure why she doesn’t want Marina to go.

 

“I’m not your training wheels,” Marina snaps, but she stops walking. Impatience is in every line of her body.

 

“I’m going to go crazy in these first-year courses,” Julia says. Marina laughs.

 

“Of course you are. You’re lightyears ahead of the Neanderthals that you surround yourself with,” Marina says. Julia startles because it’s an actual compliment, even if it’s flippant.

 

“How did you do it?” she asks, but winces when she remembers Marina probably doesn’t recall.

 

Marina ignores the faux pas and levels a considering stare in Julia’s direction.

 

“Meet me tomorrow, at 11pm. The Student Administration building,” Marina says in a clipped tone, before turning to leave. At the last minute she stops and turns to face Julia again.

 

“We’re going to have some fun, you and I.”

 

Marina grins, her teeth white in the dim light of the room. Julia thinks of a wolf’s snarl, how the muscles humans use to grin are the same ones every other mammal uses to show ferocity. She reminds herself not to overlook the sharp edges Marina covers so well. Her roommate whirls on 4-inch-heels and stalks away.

 

“It’s a date,” Julia calls to Marina’s retreating back.

 

\---

 

The admin building is dark but the heavy front doors are surprisingly unlocked. Julia stops on the entrance steps for a second, feeling an overwhelming sense of deja-vu. The chill in the air is achingly familiar somehow and Julia tries to shake the sense of dread that overcomes her. In a moment it’s passed completely. She hurries inside before she can second-guess anymore.

 

Marina is waiting in the foyer. When she catches sight of Julia she holds a finger to her lips and jerks her head towards the stairs. Julia gets the idea and follows quietly. When they reach the landing of the second story she thinks she might hear voices coming from the third floor, but they head down a hallway before Julia can be sure.

 

Marina’s head is in a swivel, checking each doorway as they traipse through darkened corridors. Finally Julia gets sick enough of the quiet to whisper: “When are you going to tell me what we’re looking for?” to Marina as they round another corner.

 

“I told you already,” she says dismissively.

 

“I meant, specifically, what are we doing here in the middle of the night?”

 

Marina sighs in exasperation.

 

“I guess I could tell you now...no, I don’t feel like it,” She pauses, faking a thoughtful expression.

 

“Later, maybe? How about never? That’s a growing possibility.”

 

Julia bites her lip to stop the retort that almost snaps out of her mouth, and tries to summon the remnants of her patience, looking at the ceiling for a second so she doesn’t lash out. Marina watches her like this is a test. She knows if she backs down it might mean the end of whatever Marina has planned, the end of her chance to learn more than what her classes can teach her.

 

But before she can figure out a response they hear a muted crash down the hallway, followed by whispered conversation and muffled footsteps getting rapidly closer. Whoever was there, they were approaching too quickly. The color drains from Marina’s face, leaving it porcelain and agitated. She crowds Julia to the wall and Julia yelps as she stumbles backwards into the stone.

 

“Follow my lead, newbie. If we get caught because of you...well, you’ll wish you’d gotten expelled.”

 

Julia is about to ask what that’s supposed to mean when Marina grabs the front of her sweater, pulls her forward, and crashes their lips together. The contact is almost painful at first, but when Julia recovers she relaxes into the kiss. Marina is as aggressive in this as anything else, but Julia’s competitive streak is a mile wide. She brings a hand up to Marina’s hair and winds it through, tugging sharply. Marina hisses out a breath in approval, opens her mouth a little wider, and Julia spins them around so that Marina is the one pressed against the cold stone wall. The footsteps stop right behind her but she’s focused on painting a splash of red against the pale column of Marina’s throat. It isn’t until the footsteps start retreating back down the hallway, accompanied by badly-silenced laughter, that Marina pulls back and takes a steadying breath.

 

“Congratulations,” she says, and Julia can hear the amusement in her voice even if she can’t quite make out Marina’s face in the gloom. “You passed with flying colors.”

 

Julia rolls her eyes even as she tries to control the racing of her heart. She drags the back of her hand across the scarlet stain of lipstick smeared across her mouth.

 

“You’re welcome,” she bites out, and pushes past Marina. “Now tell me what we’re looking for.”

 

\---

 

Before dawn they find an office where the wards are incredibly, suspiciously strong. Marina lights up when she tests them, and then her face falls.

 

“A hundred Magicians couldn’t break these,” she mutters, squinting at symbols that only she can see. Julia can feel the strength of the wards but has no idea how to touch them without tripping an alarm.

 

“So what now?” she asks.

 

Marina sighs, undeterred.

 

“Now? We get creative.”

 

\---

  

For once, Marina starts to spend time in their shared room, and Julia begins to miss having the space to herself. Her roommate is irritable and driven, tearing through the pages of dusty textbooks and becoming increasingly short-fused. When she snaps at Julia for breathing too loudly, Julia decides she’s had enough.

 

“Look,” she begins, “I’m sorry about your memories. It was fucking cruel, I get it. But unless the Dean himself lowers those wards, you aren’t getting into that room.”

 

Instead of snapping back, Marina looks like Julia has just given her an incredible gift.

 

“You are absolutely _right_ ,” she breathes in wonder, and Julia immediately regrets speaking up at all.

 

“Have you heard of a Matarese?”

 

\---

 

Julia hasn’t spoken to Marina in days, unable to stomach the plan she’s come up with but loathe to stop her. If there is a single thing she can be sure of about her roommate, it’s that she’s dangerous.

 

It’s after a particularly debaucherous weekend that an upperclassman, Eliot Waugh, falls into a mysterious sleep. Quentin spends an hour or so walking with Julia through the Maze while they brainstorm what could be causing his friend’s state. At the end of it they’re no further ahead in solving the mystery than they were at the start, and Quentin is looking a little sunburned for their efforts. He trudges away with the promise to keep her update, and Julia swears she’ll stop in later.

 

On the walk back to her dormitory Julia realizes that the inexplicable guilt she felt when Quentin told her about Eliot might have had a cause after all. She switches direction, and heads towards the admin building at a run.

 

When she reaches the impenetrable office she finds Marina studying innocently in an alcove just down the hallway.

 

“Whatever you did, you need to undo it,” she says quietly. Marina takes her time marking her page before looking up.

 

“No,” she says. 

 

“He might stay asleep forever,” Julia says. “Do you want to live with that?”

 

Marina actually looks shaken for a moment before steeling herself.

 

“He had it coming,” she insists. “You don’t know Eliot like I do.”

 

“What could he have possibly done to deserve being brain-dead,” Julia snaps.

 

Marina opens her mouth but snaps it shut and breathes for a moment, her nostrils flaring.

 

“He’s the reason I was expelled,” she says finally, dangerously calm.

 

“And you probably had it coming! Look, Marina, you’re gifted, but you’re probably more than a little fucked up, or else they wouldn’t have kicked you out in the first place.”

 

Julia forgot how fun playing with fire could be, and Marina is looking at her like she’s an actual threat. But then the anger goes out of her expression.

 

“You know, I don’t actually remember what happened, but they left me with a letter explaining some of it, when the Dean ditched me in New York,” she says reluctantly.

 

“What did you do?”

 

“Eliot was dating a hedge wizard, some guy from a town just outside the bounds of the school. He wanted to get him inside, past the wards and illusions, but all of the books that would help him were off-limits. He asked me to create a spell for him, to get his boyfriend into Brakebills. The little weasel was going to owe me a favor if it worked,” she relates the story in a bored tone, but her voice shakes on the last sentence.

 

“So, did it work?” Julia asks.

 

Marina’s eyes meet hers, and Julia is distracted by the guilt she sees flicker again across her expression. It disappears quickly.

 

“No,” she says. “They tried the spell by themselves, and the boyfriend was horribly maimed. I’m not sure if he lived, but Eliot ratted me out the next chance he got. The faculty decided I was a threat to security, and the rest is history— that I can’t remember,” she adds bitterly.

 

“All of that was in the letter?”

 

Marina _hmphs_.

 

“Not exactly, but I read between the lines.”

 

Julia swallows, her throat suddenly dry.

 

“He doesn’t deserve this,” she insists. “And I think you know that.”

 

“Oh, don’t go limp on me _now_ ,” Marina snarks, but her usual malice is missing.

 

Julia leaves, without another word. She said all that she could anyway.

 

\---

 

Julia is sprawled across her bed, trying to get her pinky finger to twist at an unnatural angle for a new hand position that seems literally impossible. She’s shaking the pain out of her digits before trying again, when the door swings open and Marina steps inside.

 

Julia ignores her, mostly because she doesn’t know what else to say. Marina drops her books on the desk, scratches Cupcake behind her ear, and then turns to look at Julia.

 

“They’re going to drop the wards, and administer the Matarese. Eliot is going to be fine, and I’ll have my memories back. It all works out for everyone,” she says. Julia is quiet still, but the shapes her fingers are twisting into have more to do with discomfort than magic.

 

“Will you _say_ something?” Marina snaps. “I don’t know why, but I want you to be on board with this. Like I said before— there’s something about you. We’re... similar.”

 

“I would never do this,” Julia insists, and Marina laughs.

 

“Yes, you would,” she says confidently, and Julia heart skips a beat because Marina might be right. Julia is afraid that if their roles were reversed, this is exactly how far she might go.

 

“Maybe,” she admits, “but I don’t have to be happy about this. If even one thing goes wrong, someone is going to die.”

 

“Nothing is going to go wrong,” Marina assures her, “and by the end of today, I’ll have my memories back and I’ll be done with this backwater university.”

 

She looks at Julia hopefully for a second.

 

“You could be too,” she adds. When Julia doesn’t reply Marina sighs, and begins packing.

 

\---

 

_Two hours later, Julia is eating dinner when she feels an odd sense of gravity shifting. Only a few other students in the room look up from their plates, but the majority are oblivious. She knows with an odd certainty that the school wards have just been lowered. Without thinking too hard on her decision Julia gets up from the table, leaving her uneaten food and a textbook behind. She heads to the room where she know Marina will be._

_When she gets to the right area on the top floor of the admin building, Marina is standing in front of a chifforobe made of black walnut. Its doors are pulled open and inside are hundreds of tiny drawers with silver knobs, and Marina is running her fingertips lightly over each._

_“I thought I’d know which one was mine, when I saw it,” she says, without turning._

_Julia steps closer._

_“Maybe they take memories for a reason,” she says. “Maybe you aren’t that person anymore—maybe you don’t have to be.”_

_Marina whirls in her direction. She looks stricken, panicked._

_“Then who the fuck am I supposed to be?” Her voice is raised, and Julia doesn’t have an easy answer._

_“I think they invited you back so you could figure it out,” she says._

_“Yeah, well, then they should have shared that plan with me,” Marina says, before turning and pulling drawers open at random._

_For a moment nothing happens, but then light begins to stream from each drawer into Marina, sinking into whatever stretch of skin is closest. She groans in pain at first, and the sound becomes a scream as she becomes overloaded with memories that were never meant for her. Julia grabs her hand and tries to pull Marina back towards the doorway, and it works. They’ve almost reached the exit before the wards slam back into place, and they’re locked inside. Julia finds her feet stuck to the floor, finds that she can’t let go of Marina’s hand even if she wanted to. As she tries to move her feet Julia realizes that the trickle of light has redoubled. The burning glow races through Marina into Julia, seeking a new vessel. Soon Julia is overwhelmed with sights and sounds and memories of awful and terrifying magic, and dimly she realizes she is screaming, too._

_Sometime much, much later, they both fall silent._


	5. when both choices i've got have us staring down the barrel to the bullets i can't stop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I need to start with the most important thing which is: I haven't given up on this fic, I swear!
> 
> I still have a bunch of ideas for the remaining 29 loops, and I'll continue to work on them when I get the time and inspiration. Obviously, I love kudos and I read and treasure all of the comments you all give, and that's what keeps me writing this when I can. I just really suck at sticking to a schedule and my life is generally an absolute circus but I'm still very attached to the idea of doing all 39 loops, so stay with me pleaseeee.
> 
> Anyway, chapter title is from the song "sex" by eden, and enjoy the chapter/ thanks for reading =]

**Loop 10 – In which crime pays, but only sometimes**

 

_“If someone is responsible for this attack, rest assured, they will be expelled.”_

 

Julia is not freaking out. Julia is _not freaking out_.

 

The hand she reaches out to pick up her book from where it’s fallen to the classroom floor is shaking. She ignores the pool of blood slowly drying on the wood next to it and stands, purposefully avoiding eye contact with Quentin. He’s doing the thing he does where he can’t tell a lie and gets twitchy and defensive instead—and the faculty hasn’t even questioned them yet.

 

She needs to get as far away as possible, right now. Julia walks briskly out to the front steps and barely dodges Margo and Eliot as they barrel towards Quentin, who’s arguing quietly with Alice. She keeps walking, eyes forward, and ducks around to a side pathway that’s less travelled.

 

 _Has my heart always beat this loudly?_ Julia wonders, trying to get the hammering to quiet. She feels a cold sweat break out along her neck and shoulders despite the warmth of the afternoon. Julia knows what a panic attack feels like, and she also knows that it’s best to quell them before they even start. Through the haze she finds a place to sit where her back is touching the plaster of the building’s outer wall, and lays her palms flat on the paving stones beneath her. Her breath is coming in short pants but she tries to focus on something—anything—else. It takes a while but gradually Julia starts to notice her surroundings again.

 

**_Okay, pay attention_ ** **. _What do you feel?_**

_Cold— the wall behind me. Rough—the sidewalk_.

 

**_What do you hear?_ **

_Birds. The doors clicking shut. Laughter, somewhere in the Sea. Someone—no, two people arguing?_

 

That cuts through her fugue a little more. The voices are familiar, and it only takes her a second to place them.

 

“Look, I know I don’t know you that well, but I know you’re not the type to scare easy,” Kady says. Julia turns to watch the exchange. Kady has mostly kept to herself as a roommate, so Julia’s never really seen how she and her boyfriend (friend with benefits?) actually interact, other than during the spell last night.

 

“You want the truth? No sweat. Hearing people’s thoughts is the least of my problems,” he starts. Julia is beginning to feel bad; hiding away to fight off a panic attack is one thing, but she isn’t trying to invade this guy’s privacy. She interrupts before he can get any further.

 

“I don’t scare easy,” she calls. Kady startles just a bit but turns to face her. She raises an eyebrow, and behind her Penny crosses his arms.

 

Slowly, Julia gets to her feet. She walks over, dusting off her jeans, trying to hide the way her hands are still trembling.

 

“So?” Kady scoffs. “As far as I can tell, you and Quentin are the two weakest links in this mess. Alice is too smart to get caught in a lie, and we’re both probably better at dodging authority than you are. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, ivy-league? Has it ever landed you a mug-shot?”

 

Julia rolls her eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t know that I was walking right into a pissing match. And don’t pretend like you know a thing about me. We’ve lived together for what, a few weeks? But if you’ve got something planned that can get us out of expulsion, I’m all in.”

 

Kady give her an appraising look. Penny rolls his shoulders in a shrug.

 

“Hey, what’ve we got to lose, right? I mean out of the three of us, I’m the one facing the shittiest option if they kick us out,” he admits.

 

Julia frowns.

 

“What, a memory wipe? Because we’d all get—”

 

“—Florida,” he interrupts, and after a second of shocked silence Kady chuckles lowly, and Julia can’t help but join her. Penny manages a straight face for a second longer before the corner of his mouth ticks upwards into a crooked smile.

 

“Yeah, well, can’t argue with you there,” Kady says when they get past the momentary levity. “But, hey, since we might be on our way out of here anyway... you guys want to do something stupid with me first?”

 

\---

 

The Physical Kids cottage is a chaotic blur of alcohol and smoke, and the party sprawls out the back door and spills onto the patio beyond it, so sneaking in isn’t exactly hard. In fact, they don’t sneak at all. Julia say a quick hello to Eliot and Margo where they’re sprawled on a couch sharing a joint, and smiles towards the few other faces she recognizes. Penny shifts his weight and bumps her shoulder gently, nodding to the bedroom Kady had described. The girl in question is already meandering over to the open doorway, careful not to take a direct path.

 

Julia can’t read minds like Penny can, but when they share a look she’s pretty sure she knows what he’s thinking: if there’s one thing that people like them know how to do, it’s drinking and pretending nothing is wrong.

 

Penny and Julia stand as close to the doorway as they can without blocking it, obscuring Kady where she crouches close to a wooden chest. Julia grabs the nearest bottle of brightly colored liquor she can find, takes a deep breath, and yells.

 

“SHOTS!”

 

(The rest of the afternoon is a curaçao-flavored blur.)

 

\---

 

Julia holds the pendant up to the light coming through the study room’s window. She isn’t drunk or anything, but the way the beams are refracted through the facets is just so _pretty_.

 

(She’s a little drunk.)

 

“So what does it do?” she asks.

 

Kady grins up at her from where she’s sprawled on the floor, leaning back into the space between Julia’s right leg and Penny’s left.

 

“It looks bunk,” Penny says, disappointed but still entertained by the spinning reflection.

 

“Well, it’s not,” insists Kady, “It’s Emerson’s Alloy.”

 

“Uhh, alloy’s rusting,” Penny says, and laughs.

 

“Ugh, just _trust_ me,” Kady says, puts down the bottle of champagne she’d been cradling in one arm. She bats her eyelashes exaggeratedly. “I know things.”

 

“Yeah? Like what?” Julia asks, at least half-serious. Before Kady can answer, Quentin and Alice appear in the doorway, looking disheveled and anxious.

 

“No,” Kady says immediately, “leave us alone.”

 

“Gladly,” Quentin says, shifting from one foot to the other, “we just—we’ve got to discuss—”

 

“Quentin?” Julia cuts in. He looks relieved for the interruption.

 

“We all did the spell, Q, but they don’t have anything to prove it. So we’ll all just...sit down with Sunderland and we’ll tell her the same thing,” Julia continues.

 

Alice looks unimpressed.

 

“And what would that be?” she asks.

 

“We were all right here. Studying. The entire night,” Kady says.

 

“Being out of our rooms that late isn’t exactly allowed,” Alice points out.

 

Kady shrugs.

 

“Best lies are based in truth, babe,” she reasons, and no one has an argument for that. Out of things to say, Kady picks up the champagne again and tilts the neck of it towards Quentin.

 

“Liquid courage?” she offers.

 

Quentin sighs, and takes the bottle.

 

\---

 

Their plan immediately goes to shit, of course. Sunderland used some sort of locating spell to find the book Alice buried in the woods. Kady can lie well enough to trick a polygraph, and Alice is unreadable, but Julia relies completely on her sarcasm and indifference to put the professor off her trail.

 

Quentin isn’t so lucky. The air in the lounge outside Sunderland’s office is heavy with apprehension as Alice grills him.

 

“What did you say?” she hisses. He won’t stop pacing and it’s slowly driving Julia nuts.

 

“Nothing!” he insists, but he stops pacing and sits down between Alice and Julia. Slowly, everyone looks towards Kady, and when she notices the staring she makes a face.

 

“Don’t look at me,” she says, dismissively waving a hand towards Quentin. With a creak, the door to the office swings open and Penny is standing in the entrance, Professor Sunderland looking grim behind him.

 

“It’s fine,” he says, “let’s go.”

 

He holds out a hand towards Kady and looks towards Julia, nodding his head towards the exit. Julia scrambles to her feet to follow before Sunderland can change her mind.

 

Penny stops to look at Alice oddly. “You’re welcome,” he says, and then pulls Kady towards the hallway.

 

Alice and Quentin stand tentatively.

 

“What does that mean?” she asks, but Sunderland skips the explanation.

 

“Quentin, can I see you for a moment?” she asks, in a way that is actually not a question at all.

“Alice, you’re free to go.”

 

Julia sees the pleading look he throws her way but is helpless to stop the thing from happening. As Alice stands in momentary shock, Quentin quietly follows the professor back into her office. The click of the door quietly shutting behind them sounds uncannily like a death knell, and the walk back towards their respective rooms is unbearably quiet.

 

\---

 

“Penny said that it was either rat on Quentin, or she was going to expel us all,” Kady says, after the lights are out and they’re trying to fall asleep. Julia stares at the ceiling and doesn’t know how to reply for a long time. When she’s convinced Kady must have dozed off she finally whispers into the darkness of the room.

 

“I don’t think Quentin can handle it. The not-remembering. I don’t think any of us could.”

 

From the bed across the room she hears a deep breath, a long sigh.

 

“Yeah,” Kady agrees. “But would you want to take his place?”

 

Julia hates herself a little more than usual when she realizes that she never would.

 

\---

 

Later the next morning, Julia hears knocking on her dorm room door. When she squints through the peephole she can make out Quentin’s face, pale and drawn in the artificial light. She lets him in, and they’re hugging as soon as he crosses the threshold.

 

“Don’t let me forget,” he says, muffled, into her neck. He pulls back, a hand on each of her shoulders, and the look in his eyes is intense and desperate. 

 

“When the Specialist comes and I’m gone, you need to find me, okay? Find me and make me remember again, Jules. I can’t— I can’t find out that everything I ever wanted is real, and then go back to being a depressed super-nerd,” he rambles.

 

Julia puts a hand over one of his.

 

“I will,” she promises. There’s not much else she can say, so she changes the subject.

 

“C’mon,” she says. “I know you haven’t eaten since yesterday. We’ll take care of that while you tell me what Sunderland said.”

 

\---

 

Julia’s never believed in miracles, but she thinks that Quentin not being expelled might count as divine intervention. He won’t talk about what happened when it was just him and the Specialist, but if repressing the entire event will help him settle back into academia she figures it’s the lesser of two evils.

 

In any case, she doesn’t get much time to ponder Quentin’s trauma before a new crisis emerges. Apparently, a bunch of antisocial magic-users were traditionally expected to secure mentors, and they did it with an awful suped-up version of chess.

 

Julia has always hated chess.

 

She asks around, but no one seems to know if there’s a penalty for not wooing a mentor. Or if they do, no one wants to give her an edge by supplying that kind of information. Penny and Kady are both on her side—it didn’t matter if mentors were meant to give you a leg-up, they weren’t in a magical graduate program so they could go back to the mundanity of kissing ass. That is, of course, until a mentor shows up with her sights set on Penny and his mind-reading (or something). Whatever she tells Penny shakes him up badly enough that he breaks his apathetic streak in favor of busting into a mid-afternoon study session.

 

“I need you to help me get a tattoo,” Penny says. Kady and Julia stop their individual readings and look at him blankly.

 

“There’s a shitty little parlor like, two towns over,” Kady reminds him.

 

“Afraid they’re gonna miss-spell my name?” Julia teases. Kady laughs, but Penny doesn’t even crack a smile.

 

“Okay, I don’t know why you two don’t think me sometimes teleporting in my _sleep_ isn’t really fuckin’ scary, but my new mentor is a twitchy girl who accidently killed most of her Brakebills class traveling to some in-between battleground, and I kinda think that she makes a pretty good point,” he snaps.

 

“So what does that have to do with a tattoo?” Kady asks. Her arms are crossed but she looks like she’s giving the idea some actual thought.

 

“She’s got a design for this mark—it’s ink magic, but the gist of it is: if I get this tattoo, my body stays in my room at night and I just astral-project. No waking up at the edge of a volcano if I watch some scary movie before the Ambien kicks in, get it?”

 

Kady huffs out a sigh and gets to her feet.

 

“Alright tough-guy,” she says, “let’s do it. Jules, you want to be his hand-holder?”

 

Julia grins slowly. Penny actually looks a little nervous, but he scoffs.

 

“I don’t need you to hold my damn hand, I need to stop waking up in places stranger than someone else’s bed,” he says.

 

Kady rolls her eyes, leans over, pats him on the cheek with more than a bit of condescension.

 

“It’s ink _magic_ , asshole. Trust me, you’re gonna want to hold onto something.”

 

\---

 

“So this sigil is definitely the real-deal? You trust this girl?” Julia asked, trying to distract Penny from the thread-wrapped needle Kady was about to wield.

 

“I mean, yeah, Victoria’s story checks out,” he says. “We all heard about that class that disappeared, right? It turns out she tried to Travel with all of them to another dimension for a sick party, but wherever they landed wasn’t exactly friendly. She says she was there for a while trying to get back, and she designed this thing so she’d never get trapped somewhere again.”

 

“So she has the tattoo, then?” Julia prompts. Penny smiles, just a little.

 

“She said she put it someplace that I couldn’t see until the third date,” he replies. Julia sighs. She should have seen that coming. Kady laughs, and Julia shoots her a look because she can’t for the life of her figure out that relationship.

 

“Alright, let’s do this,” Kady says, and carefully dips the needle in the inkwell. Penny grits his teeth, and they begin.

 

\---

 

 _The tattoo hurts but they all split more than a generous portion of whiskey later to help him deal with it_. _Julia and Kady try to goad Penny into traveling to test it out but he resists, and they finally relent and head their separate ways when it gets too late to stay awake anymore_.

 

 _Penny takes his Ambien and settles into bed, less nervous than he’s been in weeks_. _When he falls asleep he opens his eyes to a dank room lit only by torches_. _A girl cowers in a corner, and when she lifts her head to look at him he recognizes her instantly_.

 

 _“Victoria?” he yells, bewildered_. _His voice echoes and he flinches_. _Why is it echoing? If this is just astral-projection he shouldn’t—_

_“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she says, and her voice breaks in a sob_. _From somewhere down the hallway Penny hears footsteps, but he’s distracted_.

 

 _“I wasn’t supposed to travel!” he says, panicked_. _“This is you, you fucked something up_. _What’s happening to me?”_

_“He said he wouldn’t kill me if I gave you the wrong sigil_. _I’m so sorry, Penny—he said he only needed one, that he’d take you instead” Victoria says, and she won’t meet his eyes_. _The footsteps are closer, and they’re accompanied by a dark chuckle_. _Penny recognizes that laugh, he’s heard it before in—_

_His blood runs cold as the Beast steps into the doorway._

_“Oh, and you brought me a gift! So thoughtful,” the creature says, moths fluttering almost gleefully where his face should be._

_Emerson’s Alloy, the pendant that he’d been keeping in his pocket for weeks, that he’d almost forgotten about, lifts slowly out of his hold and shoots into the Beast’s hand._

_“Oh, Penny,” he says. Penny can hear the sick smile in his voice even if he can’t see it_.

 

 _“We are going to have so much_ **_fun_** _.”_

\---

 

 **An interlude, of sorts: in which Dean Fogg has a migraine and Jane is Not Helping**.

Henry Fogg sits at his chair like he usually does, mid-afternoon on a Tuesday in early May. Of course, with the time lag it’s still sometime in February, so snow drifts by lazily outside the leaded glass window.

 

He wonders if the snow is as sick of this time loop as he is. Because, you see, Henry knows that if he’s sitting at his desk, in May, _again_ , then Jane’s plan to unite the students via theft was just as idiotic as he’d told her it would be. And so now she’s brought them back to pre-semester... **_again_**.

 

Henry puts down the pencil that he doesn’t remember picking up, and rubs his temples slowly. His head aches acutely and he’d like to believe that an aspirin and a shot of brandy would cure what is shaping up to be a truly hideous migraine, but he knows better by now.

 

Right on cue, Jane bounces through the doorway as if she didn’t just royally fuck up his day.

 

“Right, sorry,” she chirps. “I know you warned me but I’d thought, you know, crime often brings misfits together and of course our little band is rife with unequivocally misfits.”

 

Henry sighs.

 

“Ms. Chatwin, how many times have we restarted this timeline?” he asks. Jane frowns, biting her lip, and throws herself quite ungracefully onto one of the seats.

 

“Erm, this would be the tenth time,” she says, and pulls a much-folded piece of paper from her purse. She ticks off their previous attempts in order.

 

“There was the first loop, giving everyone a single room so they’d have the space to study and no distractions. Not _exactly_ ideal when Julia tried that teleportation spell, and then everything fell to shite after she died, but—”

 

“Yes, I remember,” Henry interrupts. The fallout had been... gruesome, but then, so had all of them.

 

“Right, well, next we gave Julia a roommate. Oh! And we let poor Quentin know about his father’s cancer before his death to give him a bit of closure, try to solve that depression problem he fell into the first time. But, you remember, the hang-up with cancer puppy...” Jane lists, trailing off at the end. She recovers quickly.

 

“So, we thought maybe if all of the girls became friends from the very beginning, they’d have plenty of potential. All geniuses in their own right, and all that. And honestly, I think giving Julia that mark was a stroke of brilliance, but we’ve had that argument a few times and I know where you stand on that one, Henry,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And of course, I hadn’t bargained on just how badly a hangover would botch things, but what can you do?”

 

 _Not expect a group of dysfunctional 21-year-olds to defeat a crazed serial killer, probably_ , Henry thinks to himself.

 

“And the next one?” he prompts aloud, eager to get the review over with.

 

“In a bit of a rush, are we?” Jane remarks archly, but obliges anyway. “Well, I took a look at Penny’s sterling childhood and realized him and Julia might have some common ground. You know, alcoholic parents, terrible siblings, etcetera. But sadly a fairly successful friendship did not take them very far. And, I’d like to add, I had no way of knowing Julia would become so _bloodthirsty_. I mean, I’d expect that from Kady, the scamp, but Julia really took that battle magic and ran with it to her grisly end.”

 

She pauses, thoughtful.

 

“To be truthful, I thought that obsession would help them quite a bit, but Quentin always turns up like a bad penny. And then I’d hoped Kady’s little crush, coupled with her good timing, would have salvaged the incident but instead, well...we lost all three, and there was no point in sticking with that timeline anymore,” Jane concluded.

 

“And the loop with Eliot as the upperclassman facilitator?” Henry asks, derision coloring his voice. Jane sighs.

 

“Yes, okay, I’ll admit that one was a bit of a throw-away. I thought an older student might be a good influence, but as usual Marina managed to royally screw _that_ one up,” she admits.

 

“Yes, about her—” Henry starts, but Jane _tuts_ at him mockingly.

 

“No skipping ahead, dear,” she admonishes. Henry’s headache intensifies accordingly.

 

“Just get on with it,” he grits out, through clenched teeth.

 

Jane continues reluctantly:

 

“Next, I realized that Quentin was hopelessly prone to losing the damn book I kept giving him, but Julia seemed like the responsible sort. Actually, Alice was my first choice, but her neuroticisms were stretched thin enough with that obsession with resurrecting her hapless brother,” she laments, but powers through.

 

“She kept it safe, luckily, and even got Quentin to actually read it, which had been my hope from the start. Except the boy’s father dies of cancer, again, and he gets so attached to the idea of Fillory saving him that he screws off to bloody _England_ and steals the button all by his lonesome,” she rages, “And of _course_ they both die the second that the get to Neitherlands because they knew absolutely nothing about battle magic in that loop. So. Inconvenient, obviously.”

 

It’s clear Jane is trying to remain positive but her chipper veneer is beginning to tarnish.

 

“So what went wrong with the Welters tournament, then?” Henry asks. He’d been otherwise engaged at the time with academic pressures, and honestly hadn’t seen lethal possibilities in a damn Welters game. For the gods’ sake, it was a _chess match_ , the only thing that should have been dangerous was the potential of being bored to death.

 

“Well, the cancer again, obviously,” Jane huffs. “Listen, I’ve tried to cure that man if only to stop Quentin from single-handedly destroying these loops, but we actually can’t fix that with magic. Go figure. And it didn’t help that Alice paired off with Margo and was too distracted keeping her safe to stop the whole thing. I’m still upset about that one, truthfully. I’d planned for a lot, but not that.”

 

“And that leads us to the lightning storm,” Henry interjects, “which we’ve already discussed. Ironic that our plans were ruined by weather, but I’ve seen stranger things in my years here, so it’s best not to dwell I suppose.”

 

“Good point, that,” Jane agrees. She picks at a cuticle nervously before continuing.

 

“Then the whole mess with Marina,” she starts, and Henry feels a full-body wince coming on.

 

“Yes, Marina. _Why_.”

 

“Well, she kept butting in at the most inopportune time,” Jane reasons. “And her memory was wiped anyway, so I thought maybe she’d cause less trouble if we kept her close. The famous expression, and all that? Except apparently enemies become exponentially more dangerous the closer they’re kept. I suppose I should have expected the subterfuge, but she waited so long I’d begun to trust she was over her inclination for revenge.”

 

Henry leans heavily back in his chair, trying and failing to crack his neck.

 

“Which brings us to the present,” he concludes. Jane is chewing on her bottom lip again.

 

“Essentially, yes,” she agrees reluctantly. Her hands fiddle with the worn list in her hand.

 

“I suppose you have a few more ideas to try?” Henry asks wearily. Jane smiles tentatively.

 

“A few!” she says brightly.

 

His headache is now an unbearable pounding behind is eyes. He wishes the cold outside could be transferred directly into his skull, but to no avail.

 

“Is there any chance you’ll allow my input this time?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

 

Jane frowns.

 

“My dear, absolutely not. Time magic is precarious enough with just me using it; there’s no chance I’d let you get tangled any more in this mess than you are. If I could, I’d make it so you didn’t remember these...mix-ups any more than the children do, but you’re too powerful a magician—for better or for worse,” she explains for the tenth time. Then she brightens.

 

“Oh! But I will give you a spoiler: I’ve been seriously considering the merit of a dog.”

 

Henry Fogg’s incredulous look is met with a winning smile.

 

“You’ll see, it’s brilliant: people will do almost anything to protect a beloved pet,” she reasons, and with that as her parting remark she practically skips out of the office.

 

Henry is left contemplating the snow again, and possibly an early retirement in some friendly alternate reality far, far away.


	6. i'm on fire today, ain't no water here to calm or even put me out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You didn’t have to jump on board with this, you know,” she says, like she’s offering one last get-out-of-jail-free card. “I mean, one vodka-fueled bonding session doesn’t exactly sign you up for this much crazy.”
> 
> Julia laughs softly, sorting through the materials on the table while she tries to figure out a response. 
> 
> “Well, it was really strong vodka,” Julia jokes.
> 
> 'Maybe your crazy just fits well with mine,' she doesn’t say.
> 
> “Still,” Kady insists, and fuck, couldn’t she have picked a different hill to make a stand on?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things to warn about in this chapter:  
> \- Mild descriptions of abuse  
> \- Alcohol use  
> \- Penny’s language being... pretty on-brand for Penny, honestly
> 
> Other things:  
> I remembered this fic existed and decided to give it a try again! Could have something to do with being a ranger now and working in the forest with no cell service or wifi most of the time. Meep.
> 
> As always, kudos and comments (especially comments) are always appreciated. Hope you enjoy =]
> 
> \---

**Loop 11 – Brakebills South isn’t even the worst of it**

 

Julia keeps forgetting she doesn’t have feathers.

 

The flight down to Brakebills South was long, and filled with a lot of unexpected questions. Things like _Why didn’t I realize suet was this delicious before?_ and _Does seeing someone naked automatically make you friends?_ and most importantly _Will I be a goose forever?_

 

The questions came and went, drifting across Julia’s consciousness when she was least expecting sentience. The rest of the journey was filled with basic instinct—a refreshing experience for a brain that never quite mastered relaxation.

 

By the time their flock—no, class, their _class_ —arrived, she’d almost forgotten the awkwardness of the trials. Almost. But the silence became particularly deafening when she made the mistake of catching Penny’s eye for too long.

 

It wasn’t that she had a problem with being bare-ass naked in front of a guy she’d barely spoken to before. He’d seemed equally uncomfortable about the whole thing, torn between covering his junk, or the old cigarette burns that dotted his shoulders like gruesome constellations. He only had two hands, but he put in a valiant effort.

 

(By the end of the night, he’d told her about his mother’s sadistic boyfriend—how he’d get drunk and angry and bored, and sometimes he’d make Penny sit, cross-legged on the floor, facing the wall, and he’d flick cigarettes like meteors at his skinny shoulders for target practice.

 

Julia told him about her drunk father. Fair was fair, and Penny had clenched his jaw so hard after sharing that she was afraid he’d crack his teeth if she didn’t distract him with something. It wasn’t a big deal, everyone has a sad origin story—except for the fact that it was. Except for the fact that she’d never told anyone but Quentin about the things her father did. She’d almost thought she’d forgotten the black eyes and the belts and the closet with the padlock on it.)

 

So now they were wearing creepy white uniforms and had more goosebumps in the Antarctic air than they’d had as _geese_ , for fuck’s sake, and Penny won’t look at her. Quentin is staring at Alice, who is looking at him like he’s a particularly interesting test question.

 

The girl that she’s pretty sure is dating Penny (Kady?) is being harassed by the ornery inebriated Russian man who’s apparently there to teach them. It’s gross, and disturbing, and just when she’s about to tell him to stop, Mayakovsky takes away their voices.

 

Great.

 

\---

 

If the Hammer Charm of Legrand was a person, Julia would be plotting its twisted and painful death. It’s not that she isn’t able to do the charm, but the added stress of being suddenly mute, and in a building that seems determined to deep-freeze its inhabitants—it isn’t doing wonders for her concentration.

 

They’ve been assigned rooms without doors and across the hall she can see Penny staring intensely at a nail that refuses to even twitch across the surface of the board. The minutes tick by, and she can see the flex of his arms as he clenches his hands in frustration. At one point he looks up and sees her staring and his gaze drops like a stone, back to the plank in front of him. Julia wants to tell him he’s being stupid. She isn’t making such a big deal about this, so why the hell is he? So they did a bit of oversharing—so he admitted he has feelings and emotions and might be in love with a surly classmate with a penchant for theft. Big deal.

 

Julia sighs soundlessly and takes up the struggle again. The only noise for what feels like hours is the clatter of nails falling unsuccessfully to the floor, until she finally gets one to stick. It bends almost in half immediately after—but still.

 

When she looks up excitedly she catches the ghost of a smile across Penny’s lips, until he realizes he’s been caught watching her progress. His scowling vigil over unmoving nails returns, but Julia feels faintly victorious for reasons other than a semi-successful charm.

 

The moment is interrupted by soft footfalls as Kady comes into sight past the doorframe. She looks in at Julia’s bent nail curiously, before stepping into Penny’s room. His shoulders tense, but he looks at her and Julia can see something in his expression change, soften. Kady leaves some sort of pamphlet on the workbench and touches his shoulder lightly. Then she smiles, the first genuine smile Julia has ever seen her give, and she turns to leave.

 

Julia won’t wonder until later about the way the happy expression on Kady’s face falls into something darker as she goes. Penny looks at the area where she’d just stood, looks past it, lost in the ebb of some deeper thought, and the nail on the board in front of him spins in a half-circle. He jumps and Julia would laugh if she could. Instead she grins across the space between them. Penny actually meets her gaze and make a point to roll his eyes exaggeratedly. Julia flicks a nail in his direction and hears a Russian-accented yell of disapproval echo from down the hall. It’s followed by stomping footsteps and disgruntled mutterings. She does her best to look busy, and the hours pass.

 

\---

 

“Few know, and even fewer understand—mind control. And _these_ are your first subjects.”

 

Mayakovsky has reached an even higher peak of skin-crawling creepiness. Julia didn’t think it was possible, but here they are. She’s stuck with a jar of moths and she flinches on sight. Mayakovsky mistakes it for simple fear instead of a knee-jerk reaction to the trauma of the Beast that still feels like it happened yesterday—but Julia catches wary looks from the students close enough to see the fluttering of delicate wings and tries to tamp down her rising panic. The professor has moved on, past her and down the table, to lean over Penny menacingly. It then that he notices the homebrew tattoo on Penny’s bicep.

 

“You’re a psychic?” he demands, as if he should have been told. Penny shrugs, a lazy roll of his shoulders.

 

They are unceremoniously commanded to herd a bunch of insects through hoops and Mayakovsky whisks Penny away to god-knows-where.

 

Then, Julia is left in a room with Kady and a jar full of terror.

 

Their voices have been returned but it doesn’t feel that way. The silence drags on as Kady fidgets with an electrode (which, obvious question: why are there electrodes? Julia hopes they won’t find out).

 

“So. This might be a little awkward,” she finally ventures.

 

Kady huffs out a laugh.

 

“I think moths are ruined for me forever,” Kady agrees.

 

“Well... at least we won’t feel bad if we zap a few.”

 

\---

 

Julia groans and lets her head fall with a dull thud onto her crossed arms. Kady stretches out a crick in her neck from where she’s been hunched and concentrating on the glowing hoops.

 

“That thing he said about handing out oranges on the side of a highway on-ramp? Sounding better and better,” Kady says. Julia wants to agree, and her hatred of Mayakovsky intensifies even more.

 

“Maybe we just need a break,” she says. Kady raises an eyebrow.

 

“I’m mean, I’m not complaining, but where would we go?” she asks. Julia feels herself smiling for the first time that day.

 

“We could always figure out where he keeps the lichen-vodka.”

 

\---

 

They’re each a generous tumbler-and-a-half of vodka deep, and the cold stone of Brakebills South is feeling warm and comfortable for once. As it turns out, vodka isn’t hard to find when your alcoholic professor keeps half-opened bottles scattered around the school.

 

Kady and Julia had been sitting on a long wooden bench when they began drinking, but they’d somehow migrated to the floor. Julia leans heavily against the wall and Kady reclines against the bench, her arms extended along the wood to either side and her long legs stretched out and crossed in front of her. Julia wonders where she’d found combat boots to replace their weird uniform slippers, but the thought is gone before she can ask about it.

 

“It’s a stupid school, is all I’m saying,” Kady insists. “I wouldn’t even care if they wiped my memory. Y’know, if I got expelled. I mean, I would never get caught— for anything— but, you know? Stupid.”

 

 Julia nods because she isn’t feeling too generous towards whomever it was that turned them into geese and sent them to this frozen nightmare.

 

“I keep going to clean my feathers but—here’s the thing, I don’t _have_ them. I don’t— hey,” Julia changes tracks mid-sentence. “Gooses were the worst idea. _Geese_. Geese were the worst.”

 

Kady is laughing quietly, her head leaned back against the bench, eyes closed.

 

“Yeah,” she agrees, because there’s not much else to say.

 

Julia dwells on the fear she’d kept fighting the whole flight there, the uncanny terror when storms would get too close on the horizon. She can taste ozone in the back of her throat and feels oddly like she dodged a bullet. She... really hated being a bird.

 

“This is— I wish we’d done this before we got here.”

 

Kady’s eyes are still closed and she says it like it’s just an offhand remark, but Julia knows better. Penny’s biggest fear was scaring this girl off by saying something too sentimental, so she takes the admission as the heavy, fragile thing that it is.

 

“We’d never even talked before this, Ms. ‘Sultry-But-Damaged’”, Julia tries to imitate Mayakovsky’s accent and fails miserably.

 

“Doing it now isn’t bad,” she adds, and Kady sends a crooked, mischievous smile her way. Julia can suddenly see how a hardened, cautious guy (one with a fear of letting anyone close enough to touch him) could fall in love with that smile. The thing is, she doesn’t want to see that at _all_. She shakes her head like it’s waterlogged, pushing the thought away.

 

They’d fallen into a comfortable silence, but Kady breaks it reluctantly.

 

“Wonder if the moths are less creepy now,” she reasons. Julia can’t fault her logic—can’t do much, right now, other than try to make her face approximate something thoughtful and agreeable.

 

“Let’s do it,” she says. They manage to get upright and stumble in the direction of the workbench, where the dreaded jar of moths rests innocently.

 

The oddest part is, it _is_ easier to nudge the fluttering bodies through tiny rings now. Maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s that they’re relaxed and have some shared ground to stand on.

 

(Maybe it’s the alcohol.)

 

When the last one drifts through Julia whoops loudly and meets Kady’s eyes, exhilarated. Her excitement is reflected in the other girl’s expression, and it isn’t even tempered by Mayakovsky stumping into the room and snarking about the smell of vodka lingering in the air.

 

“Didn’t notice it ‘till you got here,” Kady retorts, unintimidated. “Do we pass?”

 

“...Yes,” he says grudgingly. Then he chuckles darkly.

 

“Sultry-but-damaged, your wards are very strong. Your friend...not so much.”

 

He looks directly at Julia, who freezes (like an _idiot_ ).

 

_Fuck_ , she thinks immediately, and then begins reciting the most boring theorems she can in her head. _Psychics should come with a warning_ , she thinks, not for the first time.

 

“Yeahhh, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but we’re leaving,” Kady drawls.

 

When Julia doesn’t immediately follow, Kady grabs her wrist and gently tugs her towards the doorway that Mayakovsky has unceremoniously turned into a portal. She sees the green lawn of Brakebills beyond the frame and snaps back to the present, trailing behind Kady. Julia tries to leave Mayakovsky’s piercing stare far behind in the frigid hallways of Brakebills South, but somehow it feels like his smug judgement hitches a ride back.

 

\---

 

The thing about spending time in a frozen wasteland pretending to be a school is this: Julia forgets that _wasn’t_ the worst that things could get.

 

It hasn’t been a full day after their return from Brakebills South when Penny knocks on Julia’s door hard enough to make the hinges clatter threateningly.

 

“Alright! Hold on—” she yelps, opening the door and hoping to not get a fist to the face. Penny stops mid-swing, blinking at her owlishly for a second.

 

“I need your help,” he says.

 

\---

 

Kady sits in the darkened study room, the one adjacent to the stairwell that serves as the perfect midnight smoke-spot. She’s staring at the wood grain of the table in the center of the room and doesn’t look up when Penny pushes the door open. They may as well not be in the room at all, for how little she acknowledges their entrance.

 

“She’s been like this since this morning,” Penny says quietly. “Dean Fogg called her down to the administration building and she never came back. I went looking for her and found her here—she’s kinda scaring the shit out of me. I figured—I dunno, I mean, maybe she’d talk to someone else. It’s stupid,” he says, the sliver of worry in his voice hardening to something steelier.

 

Julia has had panic attacks; horrible, violent things that take ahold of her lungs and mind and refuse to let go. She looks Kady over from ten feet away and notices the vacant stare, the way one hand is clenched on her thigh hard enough that the knuckles are white. Maybe they look different, on someone else.

 

Julia steps carefully over to the bench, sets herself down close enough to Kady that their shoulders brush. She can feel the other girl’s stuttered breathing through the point of contact, her muscles tensed like a loaded spring. Penny slides down the wall next to the doorway, a guard-dog at rest but still wary and concerned. After what feels like an hour (but may only have been a fraction of that), Kady lets out a shuddered, broken breath all at once. It’s half a sob, half a gasp; Julia is so startled by the sound that she almost misses the way that Penny forcible flinches as if he’s been slapped.

 

“What is it?” she asks him, still careful to keep her voice as calm as she can.

 

“Her wards, she—Her mom...”

 

“She’s dead,” Kady rasps, her voice as small as Julia’s ever heard it.

 

Penny gets to his feet, makes his way to the table, and plops himself down on Kady’s other side. He and Julia sit a vigil of sorts as silent tears track their way down their friend’s face, and Kady finally relaxes enough to rest her head on her crossed arms, her shoulders shaking with sobs that are difficult to stop now that they’ve started with a vengeance.

 

Julia isn’t the best with words, and she knows Penny isn’t either. Tentatively, she rests her hand between Kady’s shoulder blades, tracing small circles and aimless patterns, hoping she can draw some small comfort from the only thing Julia can really offer. Penny leans closer, his arm around her waist.

 

Julia takes a minute to feel badly that the two people least inclined towards comfort are the ones that Kady is stuck with, but they’ll have to do for now.

 

\---

 

Kady is withdrawn in a way that is unfamiliar in the weeks that follow. Julia sees her at meal times with Penny, just for long enough for her to pick at toast and a mug of coffee some days, before she inevitably gets up early and leaves. After the sixth night of this routine, Julia ducks out after them. She follows a few hundred feet behind as they hurry down dimly lit hallways in an adjacent lecture hall until they get to Kady’s favorite study room. When Julia creeps into view she’s shocked to see the room transformed into something she wouldn’t recognize.

 

If she’s being honest, it looks a little bit like a serial-killer’s den. She spots a map of New York City with dozens of red pins, and the name “Marina” scrawled deeply into the tacked-up butcher paper multiple times (like the name itself was a source of rage). Then Kady notices her arrival and an awkwardly silent five seconds follows.

 

“This isn’t as stalkerish as it looks,” she insists.

 

“Not judging,” Julia shoots back, “just curious.”

 

\---

 

It turns out that there’s an entire world of magic that Julia hadn’t even considered. When she’d passed the entrance exam into Brakebills, she hadn’t thought about what happened to those who failed, or even to those who were expelled later. A large part of her had probably shied away from the thought on purpose. It was a reality she hoped she’d never have to face.

 

Kady filled her in on what she knew about hedge-witches— which was a lot, more than Julia expected until she suddenly realized that Kady must have _been_ one at some point. And then they came, inevitably, to the subject of Marina Andrieski.

 

“She killed my mom,” Kady bites out, a muscle jumping along a sharp jawline as she clenches her teeth in poorly-concealed anger. “Hannah had always bitten off more than she could chew; Marina had fixed her screw-ups more than once, but I was paying off our debts. I just needed a few more things from Brakebills and we’d be in the clear for the first time in years. I don’t know why she— Hannah tried to break into something of Marina’s. I’m not sure what. All I know is that she ended up dead, and it was Marina’s curse that killed her.”

 

Julia takes a moment to digest the information. Penny’s arms are crossed over his chest and he looks at her like he’s sizing her up.

 

“So?” he asks. “Are you in, or are you gonna tap out on us? Because if you aren’t balls-to-the-wall on this one I can show you the door.”

 

“In on what?” Julia asks. She has an inkling, but confirmation would be nice.

 

“Revenge,” Kady says grimly. “We’re going to take down Marina.”

 

\---

 

Julia is unceremoniously dragged into the plan that Kady has concocted. The only advantage they have is that Marina thinks Kady values Brakebills more than getting even with Marina—and she would have been right, if it hadn’t been Hannah that got killed.

 

“Taking down Marina” does not, surprisingly, involve murder. It’s aimed mostly at her organization. Building her little empire of hedge-witches in New York (and across the country) took years. If anything is going to cut Marina off at the knees, it’s destroying everything she’s established.

 

Marina has made herself a god, and Kady would like to knock her off Olympus.

 

Preferably with a right-hook.

 

The first snag they run into is learning battle-magic. Penny, for all he tries to appear unruffled by most of existence, cannot calm down his irritation in the way that offensive spells demand. Julie’s brain has always been a frenetic playground, so clearing it for something that intuitively seems like it should call for rage is not in her wheelhouse. And even though she’d assumed Kady would have trouble doing almost _anything_ without a little rage involved, she’s the unexpected teacher.

 

Julia tries not to think about why Kady learned battle-magic. She also doesn’t think about how many years of practice it must have taken for someone like Kady to learn the patience for it. (Julia definitely doesn’t think about how young she must have been when she first felt the need to fight back.)

 

Instead Julia practices incessantly, until an afternoon three weeks into their planning phase when the beginning of a headache twinges somewhere in her left temple and she has had _enough_ of not being good at this.

 

“This isn’t going to work,” she says. Kady looks up at her from the workbench, hand paused in the motion of turning a page. She cocks her head to the side.

 

“ _What_ , Ivy-League-- you’re giving up this easily?”

 

Julia tries to ignore the sharpness behind Kady’s nonchalant drawl. It’s just a hair too malicious to be a joke, but she probably deserves some...leeway.

 

“I’m not _giving up_ ,” Julia snaps. She takes a calming breathe. “I just, maybe... need some training wheels.

 

“Seconded,” Penny says from his spot on the floor, where he’d groaned dramatically and sprawled in protest five minutes earlier.

 

“ _God_ you two are needy. Fine. I kinda had something in mind,” Kady says, and begins turning the pages in her book faster than before, searching for something in particular.

 

\---

 

They’re in the middle of binding the emotion bottles to themselves, and Penny is watching the door for anyone that might accidently stumble onto them using school materials for a personal... project. It’s a delicate step that requires a sort of attunement, so of course Kady chooses this as the moment to completely derail Julia’s train of thought.

 

“You didn’t have to jump on board with this, you know,” she says, like she’s offering one last get-out-of-jail-free card. “I mean, one vodka-fueled bonding session doesn’t exactly sign you up for this much crazy.”

 

Julia laughs softly, sorting through the materials on the table while she tries to figure out a response.

 

“Well, it was really strong vodka,” Julia jokes.

 

_Maybe your crazy just fits well with mine_ , she doesn’t say.

“Still,” Kady insists, and _fuck_ , couldn’t she have picked a different hill to make a stand on?

 

Julia looks at the doorway and thinks of Penny quietly watching for trouble, and knows that she’ll regret whatever she’s going to say next. There’s no easy answer here, and Julia isn’t sure she can lie so directly.

 

“I like you,” she says. Blunt and to-the-point. She isn’t going to ask _Do you like me back?_ because she isn’t twelve and also because she knows the answer, and even Julia isn’t that masochistic.

 

Kady’s face is carefully blank. She opens her mouth, closes it, inhales, stops.

 

“Yeah, just like that? You like me, so you’re going headfirst into this stupid plan ever when it’s probably going to get us killed?” she asks shakily.

 

Julia shrugs, just to drive the point home.

 

“Yeah. Just like that.”

 

She’s making eye contact with Kady, trying to gauge her reaction, so Julia isn’t looking too carefully at which lock of hair she adds to the vial in front of her. She’s pretty sure it’s hers, but she doesn’t think to worry about it until hours later, after the weighted silence that follows her declaration, after she switches places with Penny to guard the hallway. Before he passes her in the doorway, Penny halts and looks at Julia searchingly. Then he chuckles lowly.

 

“Oh yeah. Been there,” he says, grinning like Julia isn’t broadcasting her weird maybe-crush on his not-quite-girlfriend to every Psychic wavelength on Earth.

 

“Oh my _god_ ,” Julia groans, grabbing him by the shoulder and shoving him bodily aside. He’s still laughing as he heads to the table. She needs to get some kind of protection against mind-reading if one of her unexpected friends here is a psychic. Some kind of...brain...condom.

 

Penny barks out a laugh from the room behind her.

 

“Yeah, great idea. No glove, no love,” he snarks.

 

Julia slams the door.

 

\---

 

_Penny and Julia set a date to use the emotion bottles, just to practice_. _Kady opts out, citing some kind of bad experience with them in the past_. _She warns them that it’s hedge-magic, just a quick and dirty work-around, that they shouldn’t go past three hours with the necklaces on_. _They give her the requisite “yes, mom” and get to work_.

 

_The problem begins when neither of them set an alarm. Practicing battle magic with emotion bottles is like popping three Adderall and studying for a final—it immediately became impossible to tell how long they’d been in the clearing_. _When the sun slipped behind the treetops and the light took on a faded quality, Julia began to worry. Well, not worry, obviously, but she acknowledged the immediate problem and brought it to Penny’s attention_. _After a brief and deadpan discussion of the backlash they were about to face, they both agreed that ripping the Band-Aid off would be their best and only option_.

_Needless to say, they were wrong._

_The non-magic world has recorded many instances where someone can die from physiological effects related to emotion. It would be impossible to say for certain if Julia took the charm off and died from a heart attack brought on by exaggerated depression, or if Penny’s blood pressure intensified so much from his amplified anger at his life in general_. _The bottles had been on for twelve hours when the two even remembered to check the time; anything that happened in the clearing could have resulted in extreme bodily harm_.

_It could have been, as Kady discovered later, due to the fact that they’d mixed up the attuning ingredients in their respective bottles._

_(Jane never did quite figure out the details_.)


	7. you’re wearing my coat while we’re sleeping— yeah, it feels like i’ve come home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kady is looking at her lips. It’s lightning-quick and barely there, and her gaze jumps back up to meet Julia’s eyes a second later. She looks surprised, maybe at the fact that Julia was already staring at her. Julia tries to think of an appropriately neutral topic of conversation to distract her from... whatever this is.
> 
> “Your eyes are—really green,” she says instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seven months without updates and then two in one month? And the chapter is like, 2000 words longer than it probably needed to be??
> 
> I’m incapable of keeping an update schedule, as anyone still reading can tell. (Whoops.) This chapter definitely is more of an M-rating, so I changed the story rating to reflect it. It’s also the first thing I’ve ever written even approaching smut, because explicit content was kinda inevitable with this many alternate realities, so, sorry if it’s awkwardly done, and if it isn’t then... dope!
> 
> I own nothing, title is from “Feels Like Coming Home” (Jetta).
> 
> As always, I'm at breakshitandtakepictures.tumblr.com and feel free to jump into my asks for pretty much anything at all. Hope you enjoy, and (as always) comments and kudos are straight-up cherished, y'all =]

Some Saturday mornings start slow, in the second semester. This is especially true on mornings after Eliot has decided to try literally any new cocktail involving absinthe.

 

Julia is usually the first one awake but it’s 10 am and neither she nor Kady have opened the blinds yet. Somewhere in the Cottage the morning is continuing without them. Julia can smell coffee (probably a roast dark as sin, if she knows Margo) brewing steadily.

 

The hungover haze is interrupted as Julia slowly becomes aware of some kind of disturbance downstairs, the sounds of disgruntled housemates filtering up the stairs into their room.

 

“Yo, I’m not gonna tell you again,” she can hear someone snap, “I’m going upstairs, man, get out of my way before I _make_ you.”

 

This is followed by a yelp that sounds a lot like Todd, and heavy footsteps making their way down the carpeted hallway, all the way to their door. A sharp staccato knock rattles the wood in its frame, and Julia discovers that Kady has been awake for at least a little while when she groans and chucks the nearest object (her glasses case) at the door.

 

“I’m coming in, hope y’all are decent,” the voice says, and then there’s six feet of wild-eyed Penny in their doorway. Kady squints at him blearily, blinking hard.

 

“We need to talk,” he says.

 

Julia pulls the covers over her head.

 

“Oh my god, be _quiet_ ,” she hisses. There’s a pause, and then she hears:

 

“Hand me my glasses?” Kady’s tone borders on sheepish.

 

“...Your _what?_ ”

 

\---

 

“So, what, you had a dream you were in— Tokyo? Or something?” Kady says, after Penny’s explained why he’s so shaken up. She’s still only half awake, curly hair pulled into a messy bun and her glasses slightly crooked. Julia’s only seen her wear them early in the morning and honestly, it’s a look. She catches herself staring and forces her gaze back to Penny.

 

“No, I didn’t have some dream, alright? I was _there_. And there was this girl—” he stops, swallows. “It was real, okay? I mean, I’ve had some weird Ambien dreams, but this wasn’t that.”

 

Julia rolls her head slowly to the side and back, trying to get a crick out of her neck, before she figures out how to respond.

 

“So—magic, right?” she ventures.

 

Julia can’t read minds, but the look Penny shoots her shouts _dumbass_ as loudly as possible.

 

“Yeah, no shit.”

 

“Alright, weird question, but: how did you get back?” Kady asks, leaning forward, blinking hard.

 

For the first time that Julia can remember, Penny’s face flushes just slightly darker.

 

“Don’t worry about it,” he says gruffly, and changes the subject.

 

\---

 

So apparently when the freshman class was sorted into their respective specialties, the faculty left some things out. Namely, that some psychics can transport themselves to literally anywhere in any known universe. Theoretically.

 

“Why the fuck did they wait until now for the big reveal?” Kady asks, annoyance heavy in her voice. Julia wonders if she has any other expressions other than annoyed or sarcastic. She’s also wondering why Penny wanted _her_ here for this conversation. Julia doesn’t... know him, like that. And the whole mood of the room is awkward, tense, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or maybe it’s just her imagination.

 

“I don’t have a damn clue. But,” Penny hesitates, steels himself: “I need your help.”

 

Not her imagination, then.

 

“Wait— me, specifically? I don’t know anything about being psychic. Physical kid, remember?” Julia reminds him, pointing at her own sternum.

 

Penny rolls his eyes.

 

“Yeah, how could I forget. It’s all you dorks talk about. But this won’t need magic—or it might, but I just need a few people. That I don’t hate,” he explains.

 

“Oh _thanks_ ,” Kady jabs back.

 

“Yo, you know what I mean!” he snaps. Julia almost feels bad for him. She gets the feeling that asking for help isn’t something he’s done often. Or ever, maybe.

 

“Alright,” Kady relents, “what do we do?”

 

\---

 

In the scheme of things, Julia might not have agreed to help if she knew it would involve approaching the withdrawn resident genius of their class. Alice is intimidating in that way that someone inevitably is when they look at everyone else in the room like they’re especially interesting insects.

 

“What do you want,” she says flatly, eyes never leaving the diagram she’s studying. Julia stops short in the doorway so suddenly that Kady crashes into her back, and she has to shoot an arm out to grab the doorway to stop them both from falling.

 

“Hey,” Julia starts tentatively. “We just...we wanted to—”

 

Alice looks up, her eyes a striking blue. Julia has the unsettling feeling that whatever lie she’s about to tell will be as transparent as she feels right now.

 

“Ineedyourhelp,” she says all at once, and then takes a more relaxed breath and tries to appear less of an anxious mess.

 

Alice blinks, slowly, confusion flitting across her face before she mutters quietly, _déjà vu_ , and refocuses her attention. She bites her lip, and gives Julia a considering look. Kady steps out from behind her and tries to look... stern, maybe? She’s getting some pretty strong bouncer-vibes, honestly.

 

Alice sighs.

 

“Why?” she asks, and leans back in the wooden library chair.

 

“You’re the smartest person in this freakin’ school,” Kady answers, like it’s obvious, because—well.

 

“No,” Alice snaps, “I meant: why would I help you? Do you think I have nothing better to do than be a tutor for every student at Brakebills? I’m smart because I _study_ , okay? And I—”

 

Julia interrupts what probably would have been a long-brewing tirade.

 

“There has to be something we could do for you,” she interjects. “Is there like... anything you’re bad at?”

 

Alice’s brow furrows just slightly. She opens her mouth to speak but her teeth click shut on whatever she was going to say.

 

“C’mon,” Kady encourages, “it’s not like we’re in any position to judge.”

 

“...Okay,” Alice sighs. “Do you know Margo? Hanson? She’s a physical kid too.”

 

Julia almost laughs but manages to reign it in. Of course she knows Margo.

 

Margo... makes herself known.

 

“Sure do,” she says. “What about her?”

 

“I think... well, okay, I can tell she doesn’t like me. At least, I think? She mostly just stares at me whenever I’m in the room and it just feels like there’s some animosity there.”

 

Julia snorts as she tries to maintain her composure. Kady elbows her, hard.

 

“So you want us to kick her ass?” Kady asks, leaning heavily against the doorframe. She looks far more comfortable with _this_ conversation.

 

“No!” Alice backpedals, “God, I just want you to figure out why she hates me so much. It’s making the cottage situation... awkward. And I’m not—I don’t really get people. And, you know, talking to them? They’re confusing?”

 

The corner of Julia’s mouth ticks up in a smile.

 

“Yeah, uh, I think we can get to the bottom of that,” she assures her.

 

“I bet Margo wants _her_ to bottom—” Kady starts, and Julia steps down on her foot with all of her weight. Kady winces and doesn’t finish the sentence.

 

“What?” Alice asks, giving Kady a shrewd look.

 

“ _Nothing_ ,” Julia insists sweetly. “And sure, we can handle this people-person stuff for you. Consider it done, okay?”

 

Alice nods once, a little stiffly, seemingly satisfied.

 

“So, what can I help you with?” she reluctantly asks.

 

Julia grins, and her voice sounds like an apology as she tries to explain:

 

“Okay, have you heard of a Faraday cage?”

 

\---

 

Perfectly manicured nails tap rhythmically on the surface of the only non-vandalized table in the Physical Kid cottage.

 

“What do you _want_?” Margo asks bluntly. “I’m in the middle of something, and if I miss my shot at Ibiza because you freshman trolls took time away from my planning I’m going to be _very_. _upset._ ”

 

Her words are biting but her tone borders on amused, with a tinge of curiosity. Kady and Julia haven’t had a reason to cross paths with Margo much— Quentin is Margo and Eliot’s mascot, and they don’t seem to take much interest in the younger students, besides him.

 

And, well, Alice, apparently.

 

“What’s your deal with Alice?” Kady asks bluntly. “You’re creeping her out. She’s pretty sure you hate her. _I’m_ pretty sure you want to get in her pants,” she adds unnecessarily.

 

Margo laughs loudly, a genuine reaction for once.

 

“Well,” she drawls, “Eliot has his thing for depressed, nerdy first-year guys and I—” she pauses mischievously, “—have a thing for anxious, perfectionist first-year girls.”

 

Trust Margo to come right out with it.

 

“You owe me twenty bucks,” Kady says, already turning towards the door.

 

“No, I don’t, we took the same side of that bet,” Julia calls after her, following closely behind. They don’t bother to say goodbye, and the door slams shut behind them.

 

Margo leans back in her chair and smiles wickedly. The _drama_ of the new arrivals—she was definitely here for it.

 

\---

 

“She wants to bone you,” Kady informs Alice. There’s no gentle lead-up; Kady says it first-thing as Alice lets her into her room.

 

“She— what?” Alice squeaks. Julia savors the rare opportunity to see a genius IQ stutter completely to a standstill.

 

“Yep,” Julia corroborates, “Margo is into your whole ‘brilliant and high-strung’ vibe, and she’d like to get more acquainted. Naked, preferably.”

 

“I am not high-strung!” Alice insists, her eyes rolling to the ceiling as though it can offer her some sort of insight into this new problem. She sits down heavily on her desk chair.

 

“Do _you_ want to get naked with her too? Check yes, no, or maybe,” Kady jokes, setting herself down casually on Alice’s neatly-made bed.

 

“I don’t even—well, I haven’t—” Alice is at a loss for words, and her eyes stare at nothing in particular on the drab beige paint of her bedroom walls.

 

“ _I think we broke her_ ,” Kady stage-whispers. Julia swats at her and rolls her eyes.

 

“So, we’ll leave you to chew that one over,” Julia segues, “but let’s get back to that little experiment we wanted your help with?”

 

Alice seems a little more comfortable with the topic change.

 

“Right. I took a few hours to go over the theory, and it would really just be a sequence of shielding wards maintained by concentration—”

 

\---

 

Penny is throwing a rubber ball at the ceiling of his dorm room, catching it with a flick of his wrist before sending it hurling upwards once more in a dizzying rhythm.

 

“Hey; I think we figured something out for your little problem,” Kady says.

 

Penny snorts.

 

“It’s not _little_ and you know it,” he shoots back, a lewd tinge to his words. Kady rolls her eyes and shoves his legs off of the bed, before sitting down herself. Julia stands awkwardly by the desk.

 

“Anyway,” she cuts in, across their bantering, “it might be a few shitty night’s sleep, but, Alice set us up with a solution.”

 

Penny’s head whips up and he falters in his one-sided game. The ball smacks him in the temple before rebounding into the corner of the room, lost forever to a pile of questionably clean clothes.

 

“Alright,” he says, rubbing the side of his head and wincing, “I’m listening.”

 

Julia outlines Alice’s plan, with Kady interjecting details she’s forgotten every so often. The idea is to make a double-walled shield; Penny can’t teleport out, and no one can project their voices across dimensions to give him crap about it while he’s trying to sleep. Or as Julia phrases it to Penny: a one-stop signal block.

 

“That... might work, actually,” he says reluctantly.

 

There’s a moment of quiet as he turns the idea over in his mind. Julia can almost see the gears cranking to life in his head. His probable headache doesn’t seem to help the process.

 

“Okay,” he says finally, “two problems: first, this sounds like a serious concentration spell. And if I’m sleeping, that means you both aren’t.”

 

Kady shrugs.

 

“I don’t sleep much anyway. And we figure we take it in shifts. You conk out early, and each of us take four hours of watch duty. That way, no one loses their beauty sleep. What was your second hang-up?”

 

Penny’s expression twists, and he looks away, clearly bordering on uncomfortable.

 

“...I don’t want y’all watching me sleep. It’s fuckin’ creepy,” he admits, crossing his arms defensively.

 

Julia snorts.

 

“We have better shit to do than watch you all night,” she assures him. “Probably just going to study; god knows Popper’s contortions have been hard enough.”

 

“Or maybe things will get weird and we’ll wind up playing strip-poker while you’re Ambien’d-up. Either way, we aren’t gonna be paying any attention to Sleeping Beauty,” Kady adds with a slow grin that unfurls in a Cheshire-esque fashion.

 

Julia fights the blush she knows is creeping along her cheekbones. She does not blush. She _doesn’t_.

 

(The warmth she feels emanating from her face kind of undermines the claim.)

 

Penny either doesn’t notice her moment of distraction, or doesn’t feel like commenting on it. He’s rolling his eyes good-naturedly and Julia can see, he’s going to agree to their crazy scheme. The sleep loss has been hard on him, and he’s been stressed enough with the normal demands of hearing the thoughts of every unshielded freshman at Brakebills. It was never going to be hard to convince him to give up the reigns.

 

“So,” he says, his eyebrows raised and his palms up, hands out in an I-give-up gesture: “When do we start?”

 

\---

 

What Julia hadn’t considered about their plan wasn’t the fact that four hours feels like a lot longer when you’re bored and both of your friends are sleeping. It also wasn’t the awkwardness of Penny’s snore and the slight bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

 

Instead, she finds herself noticing how relaxed Kady looks when she’s finally drifted off, and then immediately _stops noticing it_.

 

It’s not that Julia hasn’t seen Kady sleep before. They’re roommates, so, yeah, _obviously_. It’s just, for as much as Kady shares a room with her, she doesn’t actually occupy the space very much. She wasn’t lying when she told Penny that she didn’t get much sleep. Kady leaves before Julia is even fully dressed in the morning, and usually sneaks back into the room just as Julia is drifting off at night, sometime smelling like cigarettes, sometimes like weed, sometimes like vodka, sometimes just her own perfume—a subtle note of cinnamon and orange, maybe, that lingers in the sheets on Kady’s bed, making itself a gentle presence in the atmosphere of the room (lingers on the flannel that Julia borrowed from her last week while they were sharing a flask on the lawn behind the cottage).

 

Julia makes a mental note to return the flannel soon, before it starts bordering on creepy. She drags her attention back to the Popper position that’s most recently been a pain in her ass.

 

The next two hours go by without much incidence. Julia makes some headway in her work and settles in, to the point where she doesn’t notice how much time has gone by until she hears a quiet groan from where Kady is sleeping. Kady had taken Julia’s bed, because Penny claimed it would be weirder if he did. So while he’s sprawled on Kady’s side of the room, Kady blinks blearily at the unfamiliar nightstand in confusion as her still-asleep brain does the math.

 

“Right,” she rasps quietly, remembering. “How long have I been out?”

 

Julia checks her phone for the time.

 

“You’ve still got another hour, almost,” she whispers back. Kady sits up just slightly in the bed— she rolls her shoulders and stretches slowly, feline and lazy.

 

“There’s no point; it’d take me that long to pass out again anyway. Might as well keep you company,” she jokes, shooting Julia a half-smile in the dim lighting.

 

Julia huffs out a laugh.

 

“Don’t need to sound so excited about it,” she says, flipping a page in her textbook and staring in horror at the newest diagram to greet her. Kady laughs a little too loudly at her expression, and turns on her side to get cozier under the duvet.

 

Julia tries to not think about the fact that Kady is in her bed, or how it might be nice to join her. Just—to sleep, obviously. It’s late, she’s tired, _it’s not_ _weird_ , okay?

 

_Keep telling yourself that_ , she thinks.

 

“So how hard is it to keep the concentration field going?” Kady asks after a minute or two of companionable silence. Julia shrugs.

 

“Honestly, it’s more low-maintenance than I thought it would be. Unless we fall asleep it probably won’t be a problem to keep it up for just a few hours,” she admits.

 

Kady smirks—“Keep it up for a few _hours?_ ”— and Julia throws a balled-up piece of scratch-paper in her general direction. She rolls deftly out of its way and it bounces to the floor, but she musters up a mock-wounded expression anyway.

 

Julia just cocks an eyebrow and flips her off, and Kady chuckles.

 

“Don’t stick it out unless you plan on using it,” she says, and _god_ , Julia cannot stop the heat she feels low in her abdomen at everything the innuendo hints at before she forcibly pushes the thought away. She affects what she hopes is a look of detached amusement. It’s such a stupid line—if James had said something like that, she would have left the goddamn _room_ —

 

And, Kady is not James. She’s just her roommate. And Julia is beginning to think she was better off when Kady was practically a ghost in their own dorm room, because whatever this is, is _so_ much worse for her health.

 

The hour passes quickly, and Kady reminds her when it’s time for them to switch. The spell transfers as easy as breathing, like Julia’s magic had been waiting for the chance. Julia doesn’t dwell on it, because she’s too focused on the smell of cinnamon and orange left on her pillow (or her sheets, or honestly it could be her imagination, because _Kady was in her bed_ and she can’t stop thinking about it).

 

Actual sleep eludes her, but eventually the turning of pages, and Penny’s slow, even breathing lulls her into something like it.

\---

 

It’s almost a month into their self-appointed guard duty when the Physical Kids decide to throw a pre-Spring-break rager for everyone, to forestall complaints from the majority of the house that isn’t going to a “magic sex party” in Ibiza.

 

(Eliot’s words.)

 

Julia is at a table with Alice (who has astonishingly become something of a friend) and they’re eating a hasty breakfast before morning classes, when Margo approaches their table. Julia has a moment to admire how Margo can make her normal stride look remarkably like a war-march, before the woman herself is at the edge of their table. She smiles in a way that’s probably meant to be reassuring but comes off as vaguely predatory, and braces a hand inches from Alice’s plate as she leans in intently.

 

“Are you ready to lose your _damn minds_ tonight?” she asks, mischief lacing her voice, and Alice is looking at Margo’s lips (or possibly the white flash of her canines, because like Julia said: _predatory_ ).

 

Julia sighs and answers for them both.

 

“Sure, Margo. The party is at the cottage, right? We can’t actually avoid it.”

 

Margo huffs.

 

“No one is _making_ you go, ivy-league. Besides,” she pauses, shifts her gaze, “I wasn’t talking to you.”

 

Alice possibly slides lower into her chair—or, it could be a trick of the light. She swallows, hard, and stutters out:

 

“I—I’m not, um, an experienced drinker.”

 

“Oh, you poor thing,” Margo sympathizes. She brings her hand up so that her palm parallels the fine edge of Alice’s jaw, tilting her face up towards her own.

 

“We’ll fix that.”

 

Julia can’t tell if it’s a threat or a promise.

 

\---

 

Penny arrives as Julia throws back her third heavy swallow of scotch, and she knows he’s standing behind her before she turns around. He cocks his hip against the doorway to the common room, gray beanie slouched haphazardly on his short hair like he doesn’t actually care how it looks (even if Julia has seen him spend long minutes readjusting it in the mirror of her room). His arms are crossed with every ounce of don’t-talk-to-me that he can muster, and he sends a nod her way.

 

Julia is hit by a wave of nostalgia— almost as if she and Penny have been here before, at an obnoxiously loud party in the cottage, sharing conspiratorial looks over the heads of their peers. But they’ve never run in the same circles until recently... Julia dismisses the feeling, blames it on the liquor, the heat and noise that are a physical presence in the crowded house.

 

“Hey!” Julia has to shout over the music to be heard, but with Penny she can assume he knows what she’s saying either way. The corner of his lips quirk up and he pushes himself off the doorframe, wades through a cluster of boisterous, dancing bodies, to crash onto the couch that’s become her island. Penny leans close, his shoulder warm against hers, and tries to pitch his voice over the noise of the room.

 

“This party is fuckin’ lame,” he says. “It’s like every bad collage montage. But with weirder, dorkier students.”

 

Julia laughs, a little too loudly.

 

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Guess we have to make it better.”

 

His expression begins to lean towards a frown.

 

“Man, I’m not even on the guest list. I can’t get that invested in a party I wasn’t invited to.”

 

“Well, you’re here already,” a familiar voice yells from behind them. Kady is pushing Alice along in front of her, who is flushed to the tips of her ears and, by all appearances, just—incredibly drunk.

 

“Alice: sit,” she commands, and Alice happily fills the last remaining spot on the couch. She leans back into the well-worn cushions gratefully.

 

“Everything is spinning,” she whines, looking at Kady before groaning and closing her eyes tightly. “Kady, how are you _standing?_ Come down here, right now, the cottage is moving too _much_ —”

 

Kady laughs and then looks a little guilty.

 

“Alright, babe, I’m sitting down, don’t worry,” she assures her drunken compatriot. She unscrews the cap on a water bottle and pushes it into Alice’s grip, wrapping the other woman’s hands around the plastic so it won’t fall. Then, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, she sits herself down delicately across Julia’s lap.

 

Julia almost chokes on the air in her lungs, her stuttered breaths suddenly feeling tight against the pounding in her chest.

 

Kady is close, possibly closer than she’s ever been, and Julia would bet this has no effect on her.

 

But Julia? She is on _fire_ , aware of every point that they are touching, aware of the tips of Kady’s curls tickling her collarbone and the sweet smell of champagne on Kady’s breath and—

 

Kady’s looking at her lips. It’s lightning-quick and barely there, and her gaze jumps back up to meet Julia’s eyes a second later. She looks surprised, maybe at the fact that Julia was already staring at her. Julia tries to think of an appropriately neutral topic of conversation to distract her from... whatever this is.

 

“Your eyes are—really green,” she says instead.

 

_What the actual **fuck** , _her brain squawks. _Cancel_. _Abort mission_. _You cannot be trusted with simple tasks, you useless bisexual—_

 

Kady smiles, and it’s soft, not a hint of sarcasm behind it.

 

“And you’re a lightweight,” she says conspiratorially.

 

“I’m really not,” Julia says darkly, and _that_ is a load of baggage that she does not want to unpack right now. Kady lets it slide without comment. Instead she slides her fingertips down Julia’s forearm, trailing them across her palm to grasp the flask held numbly in Julia’s hand. She easily pulls it from her grip and takes a pull.

 

“ _Jesus_ ,” she says empathetically, narrowly choking down a cough. “How do you drink this stuff?”

 

“Not a lightweight,” Julia reminds her with a smile twisted bitter and strange on her face, before grabbing the flask back and tucking it safely into the waistband of her jeans, cool metal soothing against the jut of her hip.

 

Kady’s eyes narrow at the barely-concealed challenge, before her hand darts forward again, her fingertips hot against Julia’s skin as she deftly steals the flask back again. Julia bites her lip, shuts her traitorous mouth against any number of things it wants to say. Without breaking eye contact Kady takes another pull, her throat working against the burn of the alcohol, and Julia is the one to look away. She hears a hoarse laugh as Kady screws the cap back on, and feels just a little bit of satisfaction that the liquor doesn’t go down without a little bite, at least.

 

“Don’t I get it back?” Julia asks expectantly, holding a hand palm-up for her drink. Kady pulls an exaggerated thinking face, before slipping the flask into a pocket of her leather jacket.

 

“Convince me you need it,” she demands teasingly, and grins brightly at her disgruntled roommate.

 

“Convince you? I’m the most sober person on this couch,” she retorts.

 

“Uh, yeah, hi,” Penny butts in, waving sarcastically to remind her that he only just arrived.

 

Kady laughs in his face.

 

“Yeah, uh, _high_ is right.”

 

\---

 

Eventually they migrate away from their couch and further into the chaos. Penny takes Alice by the hand once her spins dissipate, and convinces her that she’s a good enough dancer to be up on her own two feet for a while. Julia watches them sway and bob in the center of the room, occasionally ricocheting into the dancers around them and apologizing profusely (Alice) or glaring reproachfully (Penny).

 

It’s... slightly adorable. She thinks the sentiment as loudly as she can in Penny’s direction, who looks her way over the heads of the crowd with an expression of pure betrayal. She grins unapologetically, but is soon distracted by Kady’s return. Also, on a related note, the return of more booze.

 

“Eliot judged me loudly, but this seemed like the easiest option,” she prefaces, before hoisting the half-filled bottle of vodka in one hand, and the two-liter of Sprite in the other.

 

“Hellooo, weekends in high school,” Julia jokes, but she hooks a finger through Kady’s belt-loop and tows her along.

 

“C’mon,” she explains, “I need some air.”

 

\---

 

Even though it’s April in the real world, the time-delay on the Brakebills campus means that they’re still in the relative cold of late winter. Julia watches her breath swirl in the air, and craves a cigarette. There’s nowhere on campus to conveniently acquire them, and she’s been too lazy to drive into town.

 

Kady trails behind her, her boots crunching softly in the frozen grass. Eventually Julia finds a lawn chair on the abandoned patio and claims it as her own. Kady copies her, and finds a small side table to put their smuggled drinks on to. Then she scoots her chair close enough that the armrests are touching, citing the chill in the air and using Julia as a wind-block.

 

The quiet is a balm to Julia’s frayed nerves. Crowds are... not her favorite, not usually, and the muted pulse of the top-40s playlist inside is about as close as she’d like to get for a little while. After a half-hour of quiet interspersed with casual conversation, Kady poses a question that single-handedly derails Julia’s night.

 

“So which one of us is taking first watch later?” Kady asks idly, scuffing frost off the surface of the cement walkway with her heel.

 

“...Shit,” Julia mutters. Somehow she’d forgotten about their dysfunctional safeguarding duties.

 

“Yeah,” Kady agrees. “I’m... pretty beat, honestly. Think we could sneak in a cat-nap or something before Penny wants to crash for the night?”

 

“Think we can sneak past all— _that_ , without getting pulled back into the fray?” Julia points out.

 

“Okay, let’s make this interesting,” Kady offers. “Whoever gets back first gets to pick which bed.”

 

“Which bed—wait, what? Kady!” Julia yelps, but her roommate is already up and twenty feet away, laughing and yanking open the patio door, shouldering her way into the house. A wall of sound fissures the peaceful quiet of the night, and Julia scrambles to follow.

 

\---

 

She loses, because of course she does. Quentin pulls her aside to tell her how pretty Alice is, and she has to talk him down from trying to dance with her because first: Q can’t dance and second: Alice isn’t even on the floor anymore. Suspiciously, Margo is not glued to Eliot’s side either. Julia isn’t going to ask.

 

When she finally unlocks her dorm room door and deadbolts it behind her, Kady is grinning lazily at her from Julia’s bed, burrowed under the comforter.

 

“C’mon, I’m freezing,” she says, which only partly explains why she wants to share a bed. Julia isn’t going to examine the reasons too closely, selfishly grateful for how tactile Kady can get when she’s had a few drinks.

 

“Alright, jeez,” she says, shimmying out of her jeans. The denim is still a little cold from how long they were outside, so, maybe Kady has a point. She sheds her jacket on the way to the bed, and slips under the covers.

 

An awkward moment follows as Julia tries to figure out how exactly this is going to work, when Kady clears her throat quietly and breaks the silence.

 

“Are you usually the big spoon or the small spoon?” she asks. Julia barks out a laugh, cut short as soon as it begins because of how nervous she is. Which is stupid, because she’s shared a bed with a friend before. Just...not this particular friend.

 

“Big spoon,” she replies immediately. It’s true—with girls, at least. Kady didn’t exactly specify the context, so.

 

She can feel Kady’s laugh more than hear it.

 

“Try new things,” her roommate suggests, before unceremoniously turning over and wiggling closer to Julia, until Kady’s front is pressed closely to her side.

 

Julia sighs loudly for effect, and turns so her back is nestled into the crescent curve of Kady’s body. There’s another moment of silence, before—

 

“This isn’t... awful,” Julia admits reluctantly. Kady laughs, and the action causes her warm breath to ghost over Julia’s neck. She’s intensely aware of how close Kady’s lips are to her skin as she replies.

 

“Wow, _thanks_ ,” Kady shoots back. “High praise.”

 

Her arm creeps around Julia’s waist, settling over her ribs, and breathing becomes a forgotten thing as her heart tries to adjust to its newly quickened cadence.

 

“It also hasn’t been—terrible, this whole Faraday cage thing,” she adds tentatively. They haven’t really talked about it—the conversations they have when the quiet is heavy and still in the late hours of the night. She’s learned it’s easier to say some things in a dimly-lit space, when you can’t see the other person’s face (when you can pretend you’ve fallen asleep if the topic gets too heavy).

 

“Nerd,” Kady says fondly. It’s possible that she misunderstood what Julia meant, but it’s more likely she’s agreeing to the things Julia is _not_ saying.

 

(And that’s another thing Julia’s learned: just how many things they _avoid_ talking about, while they’re still ostensibly having a conversation. It’s a minefield that she isn’t always confident enough to navigate.)

 

“You can’t possible need to share body heat,” Julia points out, ready to change the subject, now that she’s close enough to notice an important detail she’d missed. “You’re practically a space-heater.”

 

Kady _hmms_ noncommittedly behind her. Julia can feel her muscles tense just slightly before she replies.

 

“There’s a chance that I just wanted to get you into bed with me,” she admits, her voice tight with nerves, maybe for the first time that Julia has ever noticed.

 

“—What?” Julia can’t help the shock in her tone, and she twists in Kady’s grasp to look at her directly. Kady pulls her arm back like she’s been burned, and Julia had forgotten how close they were. Kady’s pupils are blown wide, and it’s the darkest that Julia has ever seen her eyes.

 

“I’m sorry, Jules—I thought I was being obvious, and you seemed into it, maybe I totally misread this—” she starts, the closest to babbling that Julia has ever heard her as she begins to pull away. Julia stops her, her hand shooting out to grab at the bottom hem of Kady’s shirt.

 

“Wait,” she demands, while her brain catches up. Kady stills her movements, all of her attention focused on Julia, her eyes darting to Julia’s, then down towards her mouth, then somewhere off to the left of her face as a blush darkens her skin. She clenches her jaw stoically, seems to physically steel herself for the worst.

 

Julia takes a shaky breath and exhales slowly.

 

“You—” she stops, starts again. “Just, tell me to stop, okay? If this is—if I’m completely wrong about this,” she warns, and Kady’s eyes widen fractionally before she realizes that Julia has pitched forward.

 

Their lips collide soft as a whisper, at first, and Kady inhales sharply. The touch is tentative and slow, but when Julia takes Kady’s full lower lip between her teeth and gently _tugs_ , Kady’s low groan spurs her on. Her hand moves from grabbing a handful of Kady’s shirt to sliding deliberately under, palming over the tense muscles of Kady’s stomach, nails skating bluntly up her abdomen until her fingertips rest in the middle of Kady’s chest, so that Julia can just barely feel the race of her heartbeat.

 

Kady chooses then to grip Julia’s shoulder and push, cleverly flipping her onto her back and giving Kady a chance to lithely gain the upper hand. The kiss becomes harder, wetter, and Julia loses her breath when Kady’s tongue brushes hers, licks deeper to graze the roof of her mouth.

 

Julia pulls away long enough to take a ragged breath.

 

“Take this off,” she says, and doesn’t even recognize the low growl of her own voice as she pulls at Kady’s shirt so she gets the idea. The other girl’s smirk is back in full force.

 

“You first,” she replies, an eyebrow raised and expectant. Julia huffs, because _really, does everything have to be a competition_ , but she sits up and peels off the thin blouse she’d worn to tonight’s party.

 

Kady’s eyes are hungry and her smile slips as she looks for long seconds, before she shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it and returns the favor, shucking off the t-shirt that Julia had already half-removed, and of course she wasn’t wearing a bra, they’d been going to _sleep_ —

 

“My _god_ ,” Julia hears herself mutter, because it’s not fair, really, what that sight does to her.

 

“...Yeah,” Kady agrees weakly, distractedly trailing her fingertips over the curve of Julia’s breast, just along the edge of her bra. Julia’s breath hitches, her chest arching up slightly without her meaning to. Kady takes the invitation—her hand works its way under the fabric, palm dragging over a tightening nipple. Julia groans, and fumbles behind her for the clasp as Kady huffs out a laugh. Between the two of them they get the offending article off, and flung somewhere across the room.

 

Kady leans down, her hair a curtain falling to the side, as the warm wet of her mouth envelops the bud, tongue flicking over and sending heat spiking straight to Julia’s groin. She bucks up, and through the haze of her thoughts she has a moment of clarity to ask:

 

“You—” she gasps as teeth graze over the same nipple, and Kady’s fingertips find the other to swirl teasingly. “Are you still drunk, because I don’t—”

 

Kady pulls away slowly, smiling at Julia’s concern (and also the involuntary noise of disappointment that escapes her mouth, even given the topic of conversation).

 

“I only had enough to drink to get the courage to try... this,” she admits, clears her throat in embarrassment. “And I’m going to remember everything tomorrow, _and_ — I won’t regret a second of it.”

 

Her grin is bright, a crooked white slash against the dim light of the room, reassuring and affectionate.

 

“Great—that’s, okay, good, that’s all I needed to know,” Julia says hurriedly, and surges up to kiss her again. Kady meets her halfway, fingers of one hand winding into the hair at the back of Julia’s head and gripping deliberately hard. Julia hisses at the pleasant tug, enjoying the unexpected force.

 

Kady smiles against her lips.

 

“Yeah?” she asks, surprise lacing her tone.

 

Julia just nods, dips down to press a kiss against Kady’s neck, grazing her teeth across the flushed skin she finds.

 

Kady moans quietly, definitely doesn’t mean to just then, but eventually refocuses.

 

“Okay,” she says breathlessly, “Okay— I can work with that.”

 

\---

 

_The party goes late, as these things tend to do when spring break is imminent_. _Kady and Julia are otherwise occupied until much later, to the point that they never hear Penny’s knock on the locked door_.

 

_He finds a bed in the bathtub of the second story bathroom, curling all six feet of his height into the curve of the ceramic, hoping the cold will keep him awake until one of the girls remembers to find him_.

_The screaming returns just before he drifts off, a piercing shriek of pain and anguish, and he knows with a sickening certainty that something is waiting for him in the dark, has been biding its time until the inevitable crack in his armor made itself known. Unfortunately, the drunken, tired state of his mind cannot fight off the pull of another traveler_. _In what feels like a split-second, Penny is in an equally chilled stone room, the flickering light of torches casting the horrifying sight of the Beast into a thousand fluttering backlit shadows_.

 

_“Ah,” the familiar voice sighs, “and he’s finally arrived_.”

 

_A girl whimpers in the corner, chained cruelly to the brick of the wall_.

 

_“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she whispers, a mantra that does nothing to quell the rising terror that’s bile-bitter in the back of his throat_.

 

_“And_ this _time,” the Beast hisses, “you will take me back with you_ _before your untimely end_.”

 

 ---


End file.
